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INTELLIGENT PARENTHOOD 


THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS 
CHICAGO, ILLINOIS 


—— 


THE BAKER & TAYLOR COMPANY 
NEW YORE 


THE MACMILLAN COMPANY OF CANADA, LIMITED 
TORONTO 


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: LONDON 


THE MARUZEN-KABUSHIKI-KAISHA 
TOKYO, OSAKA, KYOTO, FUKUOKA, SENDAI 


THE COMMERCIAL PRESS, LIMITED 
SHANGHAI 


<a 
INTELLIGENT 
PARENTHOOD 


Proceedings of the Mid-West Conference 
on Parent Education, March 4, 5, and 6 
1926 


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Tue Curcago ASSOCIATION FOR CHILD 
Stupy AND PARENT EDUCATION 


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THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS 
CHICAGO - ILLINOIS 





CoPyYRIGHT 1926 By 
Tue UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO 





All Rights Reserved 


Published August 1926 
Second Impression March 1927 


Composed and Printed By 
The University of Chicago Press 
Chicago, Illinois, U.S.A. 


FOREWORD 


Through publication of the present volume the pro- 
ceedings of the Mid-West Conference on Child Study and 
Parent Education will be made generally available. 

The interest in this Conference shown by the citizens 
of Chicago was extraordinary. The attendance far sur- 
passed the most optimistic anticipations and gave impres- 
sive testimony that the people of America are alive to the 
most fundamental duty of man. Surely no duty lies before 
each generation more vital than the training of the next 
generation to greater mental and physical health and 
social fitness. We have faith in education, and support a 
vast educational system. But the importance of the whole 
formal system is trivial compared to that of home influ- 
ence and training in those vital formative years beginning 
at birth, when mental action patterns are determined. 

The desire of parents for accurate knowledge to aid 
them in their responsibilities is a most wholesome sign of 
the scientific temper of mind of our day. This volume goes 
forth to them, rich in its potentialities for the increase of 
human happiness. 

Max Mason 


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CONTENTS 


AppREss oF Wetcome. Mrs. Eva L. Lawton. 


THE CHILD, THE HOME, AND THE 
COMMUNITY 


Tur OprorTuNITY OF THE MoprerNn Home. Dr. Werrett 
Wallace Charters . 


Tus ADJUSTMENT OF THE FAMILY TO THE DEMANDS OF 
Present-Day Community Lire. Dr. Mathilda 
Castro Tufts . 


Mopsttizine THE Home ror Mentat Heatrn. Margaret 
Gray Blanton . 


HEALTH 


NEeEp or Continuous Heatru Supervision. Dr. Caro- 
line Hedger 


A New Discovery or an OL Bowie uSuaretenet 
Dr. Martha M. Eliot 


Tue Trrep CuinpD—RECOGNITION AND MANAGEMENT. 
Dr. Max Seham . 


THE IMPORTANCE OF THE EARLY YEARS 
Intropuction. Edna N. White 


Tur Nursery SCHOOL AND THE PRESENT SocraL ORDER. 
Patty Smith Hill . 


Tur MorivaTION OF THE YouNG Curutp. John E. Ander- 
son. 


DETERMINISMS IN CuiLDHOOD. Dr. Ira S. Wile . 


Vii 


PAGE 


15 


33 


AT 


58 


71 


85 


87 


98 
112 


vill CONTENTS 


ROUND TABLE DISCUSSION: RESEARCH 
POSSIBILITIES IN NURSERY SCHOOLS 
Puysicat Hratra Proaram. Mary E. Murphy. 
Menta Heatrn Proaram. Ethel Kawin 


ROUND TABLE DISCUSSION: SEX 
EDUCATION 


Sex EpucaTion versus Sex InrormatTIon. Sidonie 
Matsner Gruenberg 


Sex Epvucation In ScHoot—TuHEe WINNETKA PLAN. 
Carleton Washburne . 


MeErnHop oF TEACHING SEX. Willard W. ponte 
Sex Epucation AND Parents. Dr. Rachelle S. Yarros . 


PROBLEMS OF THE ADOLESCENT—CAN 
THE PARENT UNDERSTAND? 


Tue Imperative Arms IN ADOLESCENT TRAINING. 
William H. Burnham 


CoNFRONTING THE WoRLD—THE ADJUSTMENT OF LATER 
ADOLESCENCE. Frankwood E. Williams 


TRAINING FOR CHARACTER 


CHATRMAN’S Appress. Frederick C. Woodward . 
Tre FatuHer’s RESPONSIBILITY IN THE TRAINING OF 
His CuriprRen. Henry Neumann . 


Tue RELATION OF INTELLIGENCE TO CHARACTER. Dr. 
Ira S. Wile 


THE CHILD, THE HOME, AND THE 
SCHOOL 


Tue PRescHOOL CHILD AND THE PRESENT-DAY PARENT. 
Dr. Arnold’ Gesell’ 7 OO ae 


PAGE 


133 
139 


153 


160 
166 
174 


183 


195 


217 


222 


233 


255 


CONTENTS 


Tue INFLUENCE OF PARENT AND TEACHER ON THE IN- 
TELLECTUAL DEVELOPMENT OF ScHooL CHILDREN. 
Walter F. Dearborn . 


Direct Instruction in Moran ANp Civic EpucaTIon. 
Ernest Horn . 


ROUND TABLE DISCUSSION: CULTURAL 
NEEDS OF THE CHILD 


Cu.tTuraL Inrivence or Music. Mrs. Mary Root Kern 
Creative Dancing. Mrs. Margaret Schulv Kranz . 


INDEX 
INDEX 


1x 


PAGE 


267 


280 


300 
310 


323 


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ADDRESS OF WELCOME 


Mrs. Eva L. Lawton, Chairman, Chicago Association for 
Child Study and Parent Education 


In the name of the Chicago Association for Child 
Study and Parent Education, I want to welcome all of 
you this morning to our conference. We are inviting you 
to meet with us today, not in a spirit of triumph to exhibit 
the fruits of our accomplishment, but rather in a spirit of 
humbleness to ask you to assist us in planting a seed, 
which we hope will sprout and grow into a thing of 
beauty. 

Our association is organized for a twofold purpose: 
to study the child and to educate the parent. We feel that 
each is essential to the whole idea, and each valueless 
without the other. We are still in the groping stage. But 
such was our faith in the importance of the idea we had to 
offer that we felt we would, if necessary, create an oppor- 
tunity to present it to our city and the Middle West. And 
so eager were we to do it, that we did not wait until we 
were old and hoary and perfected in organization, but we 
plunged right in after less than a year of existence. From 
the response we have received to our conference program, 
our radio talks, and our general publicity, we are con- 
vinced that this desire for more intelligent and more effi- 
cient parenthood is a universal one. It is not confined to 
any one group or social status. All conscientious parents 

feel the need of being better fitted to guide and assist 
their children. Civilization daily grows more intricate. 
The task of wisely directing the lives of those depending 


1 


2 INTELLIGENT PARENTHOOD 


upon us for guidance daily becomes more difficult, and we 
must make every effort to rise to the occasion and not fail 
in giving the child the help it needs. From its earliest 
babyhood up, through infancy, preschool, school age, and 
adolescence, the child should feel that we understand him, 
sympathize with him, and rejoice in him, and that we can 
minister to his needs, be they physical, mental, or emo- 
tional. 

Child study, in the sense in which we use it, is not an 
ancient science, but one that dates back not more than 
forty or fifty years. In the United States, it has as yet 
been confined to a comparatively small group, even though 
its possibilities are practically unlimited. The thought 
and purpose behind this conference is to give publicity to 
the idea, to bring before fathers and mothers the knowl- 
edge that much more could be accomplished with the prob- 
lems of childhood, and ultimately with the problems of all 
ages, if intelligence were brought to bear in their handling 
of them. Much may be left to the school, much may be 
left to the religious instructor, much may be left to the 
family physician, but unless the home furnishes co-opera- 
tion by a proper background and an environment of seren- 
ity, of thoughtful planning, of intelligence and direction, 
the work of all the other agencies is neutralized. From the 
home must radiate the spirit of guidance. The guiding 
hand must be gentle and loving, but it must be firm and 
wise as well. The child senses all that is wrong in the 
home atmosphere; the relationship between father and 
mother, the relationship of brothers and sisters toward 
each other and of parents to each individual child, is all 
reflected in the child’s conduct. To make all these proper 
adjustments in the home is the parents’ task. In our 


ADDRESS OF WELCOME 3 


groups we study these daily practical problems, the prob- 
lems of the normal parents of the normal child. 

The book is an inspiring teacher, free discussion is a 
still greater one. The study group should combine the ad- 
vantages of both. It is an open forum for the discussion 
of the perplexing questions that arise in connection with 
the child in the various stages of its development and its 
various relationships, as well as a school for the study of 
the various scientific theories in the same line. The study 
group as we have conducted it in Chicago may be much 
in need of improvement. We make no claim to having per- 
fected means or methods. It is yet in its early beginnings, 
and we hope that with the entering of new and larger 
groups into our organization, we will be able to make 
much improvement. But we do claim that anyone who en- 
ters a group openmindedly, with the spirit of the student, 
seeking knowledge and inspiration, will derive much ben- 
efit therefrom. 

To act as a clearing-house between the expert, the 
scientist, and the parent, to relay to the parent the mass 
of material, of research, and experimentation that has 
been compiled in the laboratory, after reducing it to work- 
able terms, to help us to acquire both the knowledge and 
the technique to perform this job of parenthood in the fin- 
est possible manner, is the function of the study group. 
Through the group, the experimental data will be simpli- 
fied and clarified and brought home, in practical and un- 
derstandable terms to the ultimate consumer, the parent. 

Scientists are stressing more and more the fact that 
the broad foundations of character are laid in the very 
early years, that all bad habits, all neuroses, have their 
origins in the childish years; that it is much more than 


4 INTELLIGENT PARENTHOOD 


difficult, indeed almost impossible, to change habits once 
formed. In fact it has been said, “We are the habit.”” The 
realization of this truth makes the wise control of the 
early impressionable years of paramount significance. 
Furthermore it is recognized that all social welfare and 
communal progress must be planned and the foundations 
thereof laid in the early years of any generation. How 
keenly then should we feel our duties and responsibilities ! 

In planning our program for this conference, we have 
tried to present a general picture of the child’s life, his 
early youth and adolescence, his physical, mental, and 
emotional side, his spiritual needs, the father’s responsi- 
bility, and educational, social, and cultural factors. The 
picture we shall attempt to draw is that of the normal as- 
pects of the life of the average child in the modern home. 
In the short time at the command of each speaker, hardly 
more than a few points can be stressed. But our object 
will be accomplished if we stimulate those who are al- 
ready studying to renewed and deeper effort, and inspire 
those who are not with the wish to do so. 

In the organization of our child-study groups and in 
the planning of this conference, we have received inspira- 
tion and help from the Child Study Association of Amer- 
ica, which has headquarters at New York and with whom 
we are affiliated. The New York group has been engaged 
in the dissemination of child-study information for many 
years. They have widened the field so as to include not 
only group members of the average home type, but on the 
one hand have introduced child study into the home eco- 
nomics departments of colleges in the East, and on the 
- other hand have given it to the immigrant and the poorly 
circumstanced mother. All these things we also hope to do 


ADDRESS OF WELCOME 5 


here. New York has sent to us for this conference two 
representatives, Mrs. Sidonie Gruenberg, the director of 
the organization, and Mrs. Daphne Drake, its vice-chair- 
man, and we are happy indeed to have them with us. Mrs. 
Drake has kindly consented to be the chairman of our first 
session. 








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THE CHILD, THE HOME, AND THE 
COMMUNITY 





THE OPPORTUNITY OF THE MODERN HOME 


Dr. Werrett Wallace Charters, Professor of Education, 
University of Chicago 

You will notice by the program that I am pinch-hit- 
ting for Dr. Groves. This is very fortunate for me be- 
cause I have observed through long experience that an 
excellent way for me to get a large audience is to have 
someone else announced in my place. 

When Mrs. Schwartz hurriedly called me last night 
to ask whether I could take the place of the speaker who 
could not be here because of illness, she told me what his 
topic was and wanted to know if I could speak on the sub- 
ject. I replied that since I had but one speech, the title 
was quite immaterial. 

I am, however, very deeply interested in this topic, 
“The Opportunity of the Modern Home.” My interest 
arises from two sources. In the first place, I have some 
children of my own, and I have been an interested spec- 
tator in watching my wife bring them up. From her I 
have learned a very great deal. In the second place, I am 
interested in the problems of the home because for years 
I have been working upon the problems of training teach- 
ers. In this long association with teachers and schools I 
have come to feel with increasing intensity that training 
given in the home is the most important of all the training 
given anywhere in the world. Although we are inclined to 
_ criticize the home for its shortcomings and are tending 
more and more to delegate to the schools many of the 


9 


10 INTELLIGENT PARENTHOOD 


things that should be taught in the home, the family still 
remains the central agency of education. If it fails, there 
is nothing to be substituted for it. 

The topic presented this morning is well phrased as 
“The Opportunity of the Modern Home.” I shall mention 
four. As I see it, the first opportunity of the home in the 
training of children is to teach them obedience. In the 
last few decades there has appeared in the theories of 
training a great deal of discussion of the self-determina- 
tion of children and the preservation of their individual- 
ity. Many people feel that children should be permitted 
to solve their problems for themselves without undue 
pressure from parents and teachers. 

While this is an interesting theory, it is not an ade- 
quate one. It is merely a compensation for the tendency 
of many homes in the past, and some in the present, to 
coerce children arbitrarily to do things which are funda- 
mentally bad for them. It is a dangerous theory because 
of the fact that human society demands conformity on the 
part of individuals. In America there is no substitute for 
learning the English language. We must learn to read. 
We are compelled by the exigencies of society to be punc- 
tual. Thousands of conventions are laid down by society 
today—conventions which are often institutionalized and 
crystallized. Whether he likes it or not, every individual 
must conform to these conventions if he is to be either effi- 
cient or happy. If he does not conform, society brings all 
sorts of pressure to bear upon him. He may be jailed for 
certain kinds of non-conformity. For other less serious 
kinds he may be criticized, censured, or ridiculed; and as 
a result of this he may become soured, disappointed, and 
even neurasthenic. 


CHILD, HOME, AND COMMUNITY 11 


If the home does not develop obedience, society will 
demand it and get it. It is therefore better for the home 
with its kindliness, sympathy, and understanding to train 
the child in obedience rather than callously to leave him to 
the brutal and unsympathetic discipline that society will 
impose if the home has not already fulfilled this obli- 
gation. 

There may be many people in this audience who do 
not agree with this point of view. They may feel that, 
after all, the individuality of the child is the important 
and compelling factor in his education. With this I agree; 
but I differ as to the method to be employed. A person’s 
individuality is best safeguarded and developed through 
initial conformity with social conventions. After he has 
learned the rules of the game he may hope to modify them; 
but until he has learned them, his attempts at modification 
will be amateurish. If these rules are never learned, the 
person’s individuality is cramped and his happiness con- 
stricted. 

It is quite definitely my opinion that the time when 
obedience can best be taught is during the period which 
lies below the school age. At the ages of two, three, and 
four years the battle of obedience is fought. If it is won 
at that time, then when the child later becomes an adoles- 
cent, the problem is not at all serious. If the battle is lost 
at that time, the child is going to be very unhappy. 

It is perfectly clear to me, then, that one of the chief 
opportunities of the home is to teach obedience to the chil- 
dren. Moreover, obedience should be taught early in life 
so that eventually the children will be able within reason- 
- able limits to conform happily to social conventions. 

A second opportunity of equal importance lies in as- 


12 INTELLIGENT PARENTHOOD 


sisting children and parents to develop a rational attitude 
toward the problems of life. What I mean is this. When 
we come face to face with problems that are of concern to 
us, we may settle them by considering what was done 
years ago when we were young, by giving weight to our 
prejudices, or by our own desires of the moment. A better 
way, however, is to look these problems squarely in the 
face and to arrive at a good solution through the use of 
reason. We cannot settle the problems of today on the 
basis of the solutions of twenty-five years ago. Actions 
that were considered proper when I was a boy are now 
thought to be improper; and behavior that was then con- 
sidered quite impolite or immoral is now thought to be 
courteous and moral. When we have conflicts with our 
boys and girls, differences of opinion emerge—the differ- 
ences between the point of view of youth and maturity. 

In such cases we must be careful not to be arbitrary. 
If we embrace the opportunities the home offers for de- 
veloping a rational attitude toward the problems of life, 
we shall meet the difficulty by saying, ‘‘Folks, here is the 
situation; let us sit down and talk it over.”” We need to 
have our own opinions about proper lines of action. We 
must have strong ideals; but we need to realize that rea- 
son should be the foundation of morality. The home can 
help the child to reason out his problems when he comes 
face to face with them; and this is a very wonderful op- 
portunity. 

A third opportunity that should be embraced is to 
teach children and parents the methods of controlling 
fears and worries. Most of us do not reach our full capac- 
ity because of anxieties. Men in business seldom break 
because of overwork; they become incapacitated because 


CHILD, HOME, AND COMMUNITY 13 


of worry. Women who become nervous wrecks reach this 
condition not because they work too hard, but because 
they worry too much. 

Unfortunately, or fortunately, most of the nervous 
troubles and worries of adults can be traced back to child- 
hood. Incidents and series of events which happened 
when they were two, three, four, or even ten years of age 
are often the causes of later maladjustments. The home 
can perform no more valuable service for little children 
than to teach them how to overcome and control their wor- 
ries and anxieties. 

Finally, the home can become a haven where the chil- 
dren are sheltered from the storms of worry and trouble 
encountered outside the home. Home is a place of friend- 
ship and happiness. It need not be quiet or orderly, but it 
should be a place where all the members of the family be- 
lieve in each other and are friendly toward one another. 
Somewhere in life every individual needs to have a place 
of recourse where he meets people who, while recognizing 
his faults, are conscious of his very fine qualities and on 
the whole believe in him. Somewhere we must have people 
who can listen sympathetically to our troubles and like- 
wise share with us our joys and happiness. The one place 
where this can be done best is in the home. 

Yet, unfortunately, in many homes the members of 
the family live in the relation of friendly enemies. They 
criticize each other, and are habitually irritable. In such 
cases the members of the home very frequently have no 
place to go for relaxation and happiness. Oftentimes the 
petty worries of the day cannot easily be shaken from the 
- shoulders at homecoming. Undoubtedly, members of the 
home are often irritating to each other; but the important 


14 INTELLIGENT PARENTHOOD 


point is that in spite of all this, each member should at- 
tempt to act in such a way that the spirit of the family 
will be one of relaxation and happiness rather than of ten- 
sion and irritation. 

When I mention these four opportunities, I am not 
talking about anything new. They are as old as civiliza- 
tion, as old as the home; but they are so important that I 
shall repeat them. The first opportunity is to teach the 
children to be obedient; the second is to teach them to be 
reasonable in their conduct; the third is to develop meth- 
ods of controlling fears and worries; and the fourth and 
last is to provide a harbor into which the family may en- 
ter and be protected from the worries, hostilities, and irri- 
tations of life. 


THE ADJUSTMENT OF THE FAMILY TO THE 
DEMANDS OF PRESENT-DAY 
COMMUNITY LIFE 


Dr. Mathilda Castro Tufts, Formerly Head of the Department 
of Education, Bryn Mawr College 


Before passing to the direct consideration of the sub- 
ject upon which I have been asked to speak, namely, ““The 
Adjustment of the Family to the Demands of Present- 
Day Community Life,” I should like to say something 
about the attitude, or as the psychologist calls it the “men- 
tal set” in which to approach our problems. In so doing I 
shall not be digressing from my topic but shall be discuss- 
ing an aspect of present-day community life of which this 
_ gathering today is an instance. I refer to the adult-educa- 
tion movement of which I presume parent education may 
be considered a part. 

Parent education seems to me a social movement of 
unique significance. It is as if society had found a new 
institution to replace the older institution of the family 
circle. We know how the family, yielding to changes, eco- 
nomic, social, and industrial, is no longer the integrated 
institution it once was. We know that such a seemingly 
unimportant change as living in an apartment rather than 
a house makes impossible the maintenance of the old fam- 
ily privacy. Of the disadvantages of these changes and 
the compensations which must be made for them I shall 
speak briefly later, but I wish now to emphasize what 
- seems to me a fortunate circumstance: we are not so much 
losing the father and the mother as we are finding the 


15 


16 INTELLIGENT PARENTHOOD 


parent. Hugh Walpole’s novel The Green Mirror gives 
an admirable picture of the mother who would inclose her 
family within the circumference of its own reflected light. 
Every teacher is familiar with the little child’s family 
provincialism—each story, each incident referred to in 
the schoolroom is matched by “My mother saw this”; 
“My father went there.” It is by appealing to parents as 
parents, by bringing them to consider the meaning of 
childhood, and the welfare of children in other homes as 
well as in their own, that a large contribution can be made 
toward lifting the level of community life. I can illustrate 
the drift of my meaning by a story brought into the com- 
munity by Mrs. W. I. Thomas, whose brother was a wit- 
ness of its occurrence in a southern court. A colored 
mother, who was being tried for the unusually cruel treat- 
ment of her son, interrupted the judge’s severe reprimand 
and said: ‘Before you go any fu’ther, Judge, I jes wants 
to ask yuh one question and dat’s all I’s got to say. I asks 
yuh, Judge, was you ever de payrent of a puffickly wuth- 
less collud chile?” 

Now that degree of capacity for vicariousness, of ex- 
changing places imaginatively with another, is perhaps 
too much to expect of a parent, but I believe that such a 
movement as this for parent education will go a long way 
toward developing a larger sympathy and understanding 
of other people’s children as well as of our own; and when 
that happy day arrives one of our most difficult problems 
of adjustment to community conditions will “fold its tent 
like the Arabs and as silently steal away.” 

There is no magic to effect this result in the mere 
multiplication of centers, or by the increased industry in 
any one center of child study and parent education. The 


CHILD, HOME, AND COMMUNITY 17 


education of adults may become a matter of merely piling 
up information, the thrill of an inspirational talk or en- 
tertainment, or of establishing connection with people 
who are “doing things” or of satisfying intellectual curi- 
osity. These are not unworthy motives in themselves, but 
they do not help much in securing educational progress. 
In his small book on chemical warfare, J. B. S. Haldane 
gives an incident which points a moral: 

On a German war vessel were found a number of gas 
masks. These masks were examined by a British physio- 
logical chemist and pronounced worthless because they 
offered no protection for the nose. Ignoring the advice of 
the expert, those in authority acted upon their general be- 
lief in the cleverness of the Germans in scientific matters, 
and sent in an order for the British women to make masks 


of this pattern in great numbers, with terrible fatalities 
as the result. 


On the basis of such experiences as these Haldane is 
led to define education as “‘a process which puts people in 
general in touch with the thought of abler minds of their 
own and past times, whether in literature or art, in sci- 
ence, mathematics, or music.” 

Now this is an age of scientific revolution as surely as 
the nineteenth century was an age of industrial revolu- 
tion, and such agencies as the various clubs and organiza- 
tions similar to this are necessary to keep us in touch with 
the daily returns of scientific progress. But mere infor- 
mation from all of these sources cannot be accumulated 
without producing mental indigestion which may be disas- 
trous to the intelligent application of it. I speak from the 
_ experience I have had with the distress of spirit and the 
confusion of mind which have prompted some of the ques- 


18 INTELLIGENT PARENTHOOD 


tions which mothers have asked me. You suggest that the 
intelligent choice of some leader to guide will solve the 
difficulty. Yes and no. By depending upon a leader to 
supply you with an authoritative view of life or with a 
formula for simplifying its complexities, or for solving 
your specific difficulties, you are not being educated. 

What you can get from the experts who speak to you 
is an attitude, a way of going at your own first-hand 
study, with a certain amount of information to use as a 
point of departure. You will never get information which 
will tell you what to do in such and such a case. You must 
get principles and depend upon your own intelligence to 
apply them. A study of cases will aid you in your own 
analysis but it will not provide a ready-made answer to 
your problem. 

Parent education must be a mutual affair. The infor- 
mation which you receive must be made over in terms of 
your own experience and attempt at application, and you 
must carry back the results of your reconstruction of the 
material, if not in the form of a direct contribution, at 
least in the form of a heightened power of critical judg- 
ment of what scientists and educators bring to you. Two 
attitudes which the educator encounters hamper rather 
than help him. One is the suspicious and jealous resent- 
ment of his experimenting with your child, and the other 
the surrender of all responsibility, the “I-don’t-know- 
what-they-are-doing-but-I-have-complete-confidence-in- 
them” attitude. Being human, the educator prefers the 
latter but it is not of much value to him in the long run. 
He needs your aid in multiplying his works by the in- 
crease of informed intelligence about education in your 


CHILD, HOME, AND COMMUNITY 19 


community; and he will be the better leader if you are 
able to evaluate his work intelligently. 

Adults who voluntarily come to listen to talks pre- 
sumably rank higher than other members of the commu- 
nity in openmindedness, or they would not submit to 
being talked at. But openmindedness should not mean 
empty-mindedness. Mental hospitality, the willingness to 
entertain a new idea, does not mean that you need to adopt 
your guest at once as a member of your family. It is good 
neither for the speakers nor for his hearers to have his 
utterances regarded as oracular. I have suffered much 
embarrassment from having my own pronouncements so 
treated, occasionally, as for example, when I am asked by 
a mother whom I have never encountered except in an au- 
dience about a child whom I have never seen: “My child 
does thus and so. What shall I do?’ I am sure that the 
Delphic Apollo never had to answer a question like that. 
A psychoanalyst requires months of observation of his 
patient and makes him expose every shred of his life be- 
fore he ventures an opinion, the physician makes a careful 
examination of his patient’s history, etc., and the psychol- 
ogist takes at least time enough for a thorough mental ex- 
amination, and yet one is asked to prescribe from the plat- 
form. I used to make some attempt at this sort of absent 
treatment, but then my knowledge was pretty much a text- 
book affair, whereas now I have a very little understand- 
ing of real children. 

Nothing gets in the way of clear thinking more surely 
than emotion. Although our thinking is actuated by emo- 
tion, by the keen desire to find the solution to this or that 
pressing problem, yet if we care too much about the out- 
come, our thinking is disturbed. I suppose that there is 


20 INTELLIGENT PARENTHOOD 


nothing in the world so difficult as to think about our chil- 
dren without emotion. I have seen men and women, open- 
minded and impartial in other matters, when their chil- 
dren were concerned, let emotional bias get in the way of 
a fair judgment that almost any unprejudiced observer 
could make. Once I suggested to a group of mothers who 
knew each other well that it might be helpful to discuss 
their own and each other’s children. I thought that it 
would give the mothers a good opportunity to get an out- 
sider’s point of view and that since the discussion would 
be open and above board, the critic would attempt to be 
fair and objective, and the group would check up any 
overstatement or lack of discrimination. The instantane- 
ous alarm and horror which “registered,” as they say in 
the movies, was my answer, and I felt the emotional shock 
almost as an electrical charge on the platform. One 
mother made what seemed to me an admirable suggestion, 
however, and that was to exchange children occasionally 
with your friends. Of course no one took the suggestion 
seriously, but such a plan might do much to cultivate a 
new perspective: parents of children, and children of 
parents—the quality of vicariousness of which I spoke 
earlier. 

In this three-day session, scientists will speak to you, 
each from his own viewpoint. The individual scientist is 
not so much concerned with interpretation as he is with 
the presentation of facts. Yet interpretation creeps in 
and he draws conclusions from them, which taken abso- 
lutely, are often negative and destructive. Another inves- 
tigator gives his piece of truth as his laboratory has re- 
vealed it without reference to the results of his brother- 
scientist. Without realizing that one may provide the 


CHILD, HOME, AND COMMUNITY 21 


antidote for the other, you act in accordance with the con- 
clusions of one, and worry about the consequences of the 
theories of the other. An illustration of this situation may 
be found in your anxiety over the fatalism of the psychol- 
ogists who believe in a fixed mental endowment which 
education cannot increase, as contrasted with the faith in 
environment in mental as well as physical and moral traits 
which you evidence in your cordial acceptance of the 
nursery- or preschool-child movement. 

Confusion as a temporary stage is not an undesirable 
state of mind. The mind which absorbs everything is a 
great deal like a piece of blotting paper. Confusion is at 
least a sign that ideas are meeting and coming into con- 
flict with each other. All thinking worthy of the name 
starts from some conflict, some doubt, and one of the 
first steps is to search about for all the information there 
is in stock to help solve the problem. If you get some 
slight mental confusion from three days of strenuous 
listening to speakers who are working intensively each 
from his own vantage point, there is no cause for discour- 
agement. On the contrary, you are on the way to thinking 
for yourself. If such an experience brings home the fact 
that education is a continuous life-job which no one can 
do for you, you have traveled far. Indeed it seems to me 
that the baffling complexity of our present social life has 
done much to bring about a pretty widespread realization 
of the fact that education is a life-long necessity. And if 
it has done that the present age is not so bad as our pessi- 
mists paint it. | 

A few days ago, in the course of an educational dis- 
cussion, a woman of mature years said: “When I was a 
young teacher, the church took care of a child’s spirit, the 


22 INTELLIGENT PARENTHOOD 


home of his manners and morals, and the school of his 
intellect. Now the whole care of the child is dumped on 
the school even to his eyes and teeth.” There was implied 
in her further comments some blame of the family, but 
more explicitly the school was censured for failing to de- 
velop character. 

This commentary on present-day conditions made by 
a person of intelligence and discrimination on the basis of 
her own observation and experience of educational and 
community changes seemed to me to provide: a fitting point 
of departure for my talk. 

As to the changes in functions she could hardly hams 
summed up the facts more accurately and tersely. But the 
recognition that she was stating a law of social change 
would have deleted the note of personal blame for these 
changes. The law—and it is well to remember that in this 
sense a law is a statement of uniformities which have been 
observed to occur in the past—is that the school must be 
expected to assume certain new functions as other insti- 
tutions cease to exercise them; that when, because of 
changes in social, economic, and industrial conditions, the 
home and community are unable to provide direct oppor- 
tunities for the development of desirable moral-social 
qualities the school must, as an institution set apart for 
education, attempt to compensate for their loss. 

The school has been called a miniature society, or 
that is what it should be to meet the requirements of a 
good school today. But this does not mean that it should 
duplicate what is going on in society, especially in such a 
complex one as ours. Dewey says that the functions of the 
school in this respect are threefold: 


CHILD, HOME, AND COMMUNITY 23 


The first office of the social organ we call the school 
is to provide a simplified environment. It selects the fea- 
tures which are fairly fundamental and capable of being 
responded to by the young. 

In the second place, it is the business of the school 
environment to eliminate, so far as possible, the unworthy 
features of the existing environment from influence upon 
mental habitudes. It establishes a purified medium of ac- 
Moms RGA e)s It weeds out what is undesirable. 

In the third place, it is the office of the school environ- 
ment to balance the various elements in the social environ- 
ment, and to see to it that each individual escapes from 
the limitations of the social group in which he was born, 
and to come into living contact with a broader environ- 
THENE., 6) ceria « The intermingling in the school of youth of 
different races, differing religions, and unlike customs 
creates for all a new and broader environment. 


Thus it is obvious that the school must supply condi- 
tions indirectly which once prevailed when home and com- 
munity were integrated and when they furnished the ma- 
terial and technique for education in its fullest sense, in- 
cluding the education of character. 

We recall the picture so often quoted from Dewey’s 
account of the household in which were carried on, or 
about which were clustered, all the typical forms of in- 
dustrial occupations. I quote only his statements as to the 
educative value of this situation in order to use it as the 
basis for later interpretations in my paper. 

We cannot overlook the factors of discipline and 
character building involved in this kind of life: training 
in habits of order and of industry, and in the idea of re- 
sponsibility, of obligation to do something, in the world. 
There was always something which really needed to be 
done, and a real necessity that each member of the house- 
hold should do his part faithfully and in co-operation with 


24 INTELLIGENT PARENTHOOD 


others. Personalities which become effective in action 
were bred and tested in the medium of action. Again we 
cannot overlook the importance for educational purposes 
of the close and intimate acquaintance got with nature at 
first hand, with real things and materials, with the actual 
processes of manipulation, and the knowledge of their so- 
cial necessities and uses. In all this there was the contin- 
ual training of observation, of ingenuity, constructive 
imagination and the sense of reality acquired through the 
first hand contact with actualities. 


It is obvious that if the school is to take care of the 
intellect of the child it must aim at something more than 
so-called intellectual training; it must provide for the de- 
velopment of the social and moral qualities which condi- 
tion effective mental growth. The three R’s unadorned 
might well have been the school’s sole concern in former 
days, because they could take on vital meaning as tools in 
the home. But today they are empty of that meaning. 

Whenever the cry is raised that our schools are lax in 
discipline, the sovereign remedy is sure to be a return to 
the “good old-fashioned discipline” of the three R’s and 
the like. As if anything could restore to them that “good 
old-fashioned discipline’ which they never possessed in 
their own right at all. Indeed the schools are finding that 
instead of their being in themselves such fine old disci- 
plinary stuff, they are best mastered when they take on 
meaning in concrete problems. Thus we have instance 
after instance of pupils who, failing to master them after 
years of sheer drill in the grades, make good their defi- 
ciencies rapidly when put into the junior high school 
where there is an opportunity to apply them to some con- 
crete interest. I dwell upon the case of the three R’s as a 
sort of symbol, or analogy, to which I shall recur. 


CHILD, HOME, AND COMMUNITY 25 


Is the school failing to develop character, does it 
omit instruction in morals? In so far as the school is at- 
tempting to provide opportunities for the development of 
fundamental moral and social qualities it cannot be said 
that it is unmindful of its problem. Moreover it is doing 
more to accomplish the result than it would were it to pro- 
vide instruction in the theory of morals instead. Dewey 
makes the distinction between “moral ideas” and the 
“ideas about morality.” Ideas about morality may remain 
merely ideas and never lead to the practice of morality; 
moral ideas are ideas which move to action, which get 
themselves carried out. Between the idea and the act, how- 
ever, is the long process of learning how, that is, moral 
ideas must be “bred in action,” developed by action in real 
situations. Every opportunity which the school presents 
for fair play, honesty, co-operation, social responsiveness, 
openmindedness, industry, for the appreciation of the 
meaning and practice of orderliness, obedience, and re- 
spect for law, is an opportunity for the development of 
these qualities. Every time a child is encouraged to think 
a problem through, to find the means for carrying out a 
plan, to persist in his effort to overcome obstacles in his 
way of securing them, and finally to see the task through 
to completion, he is being led to develop the fundamental 
qualities of moral character. 

Perhaps we can see why it has been easier for the 
school than for the home to provide these opportunities. 
Besides the home is having less and less contact with chil- 
dren because of the lengthened school year. And now that 
the nursery school is gaining vogue, the influence of the 
school will be still greater. But because moral qualities 
are built up through practice, and not by being talked at 


26 INTELLIGENT PARENTHOOD 


or preached at, home as well as school must take part in 
furnishing the right conditions for the formation of these 
habits. I should like to suggest that I can think of noth- 
ing that would be more helpful to parents and teachers 
than some knowledge of moral theory, or ethics. You will 
not make the mistake of thinking that I mean that instruc- 
tion in theory should be given to young children. To know 
how moral habits are formed, and what opportunities 
there are for their formation in the simplest situations of 
everyday life in school, in the home, and in the commu- 
nity would obviously be of great service. 

I wish now to consider one problem of adjustment 
which centers in the so-called lack of authority in the 
home. Everywhere we hear that modern parents have no 
authority over their children. I am going to cut short my 
analysis by letting a story explain my point. A boy of 
five years was absorbed in cutting out a picture which had 
to be put together to make a pattern. He was told that in 
a few minutes he must put away his things and get ready 
to go home. He protested vigorously and there was every 
sign of a coming struggle should the suggestion be en- 
forced. In another minute the clock struck five, and sit- 
ting up on his heels, he counted the strokes silently, rose, 
and said, “The clock strikes five to go home.” Much nery- 
ous wear and tear between parents and children would be 
eliminated if we could relinquish the idea of authority as 
a test of personal power and put the source of authority 
more and more in objective situations. Often we issue 
trivial and arbitrary commands just to make sure that our 
authority is there, unquestioned, and in full working trim. 
When parents lament their lack of authority, they do 
not quite realize what they are saying. There really never 


CHILD, HOME, AND COMMUNITY 27 


was that parental authority which they imagine. It is 
much as if the three R’s would lament the passing of their 
erstwhile disciplinary power. It is a mistaken idea of the 
nature of authority which is to blame for a great deal of 
family friction. If we could divest ourselves of our pride 
in authority as a personal and parental attribute we 
should find it again. The father of the family in the days 
we have pictured got his authority not from himself as a 
sort of invested right, but from his situation. Children ac- 
cept what is natural and obvious. When work is to be 
done and each has a responsible part, they recognize the 
need of a head to give direction and guidance, and he re- 
ceives the obedience which the situation calls for. A child 
who has seen the long process of labor required to turn 
out a product does not make extravagant demands. The 
child in a large family today is not likely to attribute his 
parent’s refusal to grant him an indulgence to mere 
“stinginess’” or meanness. But the modern child who 
makes “selfish” or “unreasonable” demands sees nothing 
of the economic process involved and cannot be expected 
to know by intuition, or to accept on a mere say-so what 
has taken a long training for adults to understand. 

The problem of authority is of course not to be dis- 
missed in a word, but I believe that if, so far as possible, 
it is made to come from the need of situations of which the 
child is really a part, an attitude of confidence will be 
established which will carry over into occasions where 
it is inadvisable or dangerous for the child to question the 
authority of their elders. Confidence in the kindness or 
affection of parents is not necessarily the same thing as 
acceptance of their authority. Too many parents think 
resentment of authority, or disobedience, is a mark of in- 


28 INTELLIGENT PARENTHOOD 


gratitude and feel especially unhappy if children do not 
repay their kindness with an acceptance of their author- 
ity. An incident came to my notice lately. A boy whose 
father played with him a great deal, who prided himself 
on being a “regular pal,”’ was shocked to have his boy say 
after he had felt it necessary to whip him: “Well, you’re 
bigger and you can do it.” This, I take it, is an illustra- 
tion of my point. A father’s participation in his children’s 
play sometimes, “when he gets the time,” is admirable, 
but it does not serve as a logical basis for the understand- 
ing of the relation of authority as does participation in 
some serious work together—an association which will 
make children feel that they are a real part of their par- 
ents’ lives. 

But what a tremendous sacrifice of one’s own interest 
such participation would entail! After all one is more 
than a mother and father—one is a wife or husband. One 
is a wife for instance, and a husband’s interests as pro- 
vider, etc., his needs for recreation and all the rest must 
come first. Of course there is the possibility of sending 
the children off to a good school. I say this not in sarcasm. 
It is better to be honest and recognize that you cannot 
bring up your children properly, or that you cannot pay 
the price of their best development. It rejoices the heart 
of an educator that a mother is able to say that the most 
precious thing which her children got from going away to 
a good school was the contact with mature men and women 
of fine personalities and the influence of their high stand- 
ards and ideals. One wishes however that these “wares of 
the soul” could be had at home. 

In the problem of the adjustment of the Bbkenity to the 
community, this matter of participation comes up again. 


CHILD, HOME, AND COMMUNITY 29 


The conflict between family and community becomes crit- 
ical in regard to differences in standards and ideals. 
Those of the family are, of course, excellent; those of the 
community inferior. It is again the contrast between de- 
mocracy and excellence which has been much stressed 
recently. We try to retain the excellence of the one by 
shutting out the corrupting influence of the other, from 
the day when the gate is slammed upon that little boy next 
door who has taught your three-year old to turn upon you 
with “You old mutt,” to the day when Mary complains 
that ‘‘Jane’s mother never makes her do any housework,” 
or John remonstrates that ‘‘all the fellas in the junior 
high send flowers to the girls and take them in taxis to 
parties.” And so with standards of dress, speech, read- 
ing, amusements, behavior between the sexes. The day 
has gone by, if it ever existed, when we can control our 
children simply by shutting out environmental influences 
which menace them. Moreover, standards, ideals, and ap- 
preciations are not matters of “training” merely. We may 
get lip service in regard to them, but to be genuinely op- 
erative they must be built up by a process of inner growth 
or education. To insure your children’s getting the same 
emotional attitude toward things he must share the expe- 
riences with you. Dewey remarks that you may train a 
horse by feeding him but he “remains interested in food, 
not in the service he is rendering.” ‘He is not a partner 
in a shared activity.” “Were he to become a copartner, he 
would, in engaging in the conjoint activity, have the same 
interest in its accomplishment which others have.” Edu- 
cation in standards must be brought about by making sure 
that the right emotional attitude is associated with them. 
And in this connection it will be well to remember that 


30 INTELLIGENT PARENTHOOD 


moral enthusiasms, like aesthetic tastes, are “caught not 
taught.”” Our own example is the most potent agency. 
Turn now to another aspect of the conflict between 
family and community standards—the present-day agita- 
tion about what the whole community of the younger gen- 
eration are doing. To repudiate it wholesale as a mad- 
jazz age of irresponsibility and license, immodesty in 
dress and behavior is to shut yourself up to your own 
blindness and is a sure way to forfeit any influence for 
good upon your children. Why not try to understand 
something of the meaning of it all, seek the causes? There 
is much that is fallacious in our memory of the good old 
days, a sort of poetic fallacy which glorifies the simplicity 
and goodness of it all. You may refuse to have anything 
to do with the “goings-on”’ of today but your child cannot. 
It is his environment and the youth must venture forth 
into it. You see it in perspective; it is the one thing which 
he knows. You see it as a complexity in which there is a 
hodge-podge of doubtful values; he sees it as a whole. 
James’s description of the baby’s universe as a “booming, 
buzzing confusion” is more graphic than accurate. There 
is no confusion until some elements in the universe come 
into conflict with each other. If you can learn something 
of what seems to you the present booming-buzzing con- 
fusion by accompanying your children into it, you may be 
able to sort out for them some of the excellences, as over 
against the less worthwhile elements. It would be at least 
better than to have them go into it alone and accept it in 
its entirety. But there is also a possibility that you may 
find something of profit to yourself. You may find the 
variants from the old, which are seeds of a new progress. 
How unreasoning and unreasonable we are. We criti- 


CHILD, HOME, AND COMMUNITY 31 


cize our young people for their restless spirit of adven- 
ture and for their unwillingness to submit to the long dis- 
cipline necessary for perfecting any technique for occu- 
pation or profession. We are terrified by their experimen- 
tal attitude, their unafraid search for Reality, their lack 
of reverence for the things made sacred by tradition, and 
their disrespect of authority in general. They want life 
that is full of thrill, risk, danger. In other words life 
must be for them a “Great Adventure.” Do you smile at 
the triteness of my climax? Then I have proved my point. 
We elders tell youth that “literature is a great adven- 
ture,” that “business is the great adventure,” that “‘reli- 
gion is the great adventure.”” And you will find a host of 
other things that should be a great adventure if you pick 
up any magazine for a few minutes of reading. We are 
telling the young that adventure is all, and all is for ad- 
venture, and we are surprised that they are beginning to 
believe it. 

Furthermore this is an age of science. We look every 
morning for the thrill of a new discovery which will per- 
form this or that miracle overnight; and science has given 
us so many thrillers that we have a just basis for our ex- 
pectation. But with the popularizing of science, a great 
human benefit, there is the unfortunate circumstance that 
so few of the reading public appreciate the long prepara- 
tion in technique necessary before an investigator is 
equipped to enter upon his task, and, indeed, the lifetime 
of investigation that is often back of these revolutionary 
discoveries which seem to spring up over night, ready for 
the early morning edition of the paper. It is again the 
separation of process and product. It is small wonder that 
our young people cherish the secret belief that they can 


32 INTELLIGENT PARENTHOOD 


achieve results by the alchemy of some short cut rather 
than by long and diligent application. 

Again, the technique of science is experiment. Ex- 
periment is everywhere. Not the method of authority, but 
of experiment, is their heritage. They hear nothing else, 
they see nothing else, they know nothing else. What then 
do we expect? 

My personal opinion, based upon too limited experi- 
ence, perhaps, is that our young people are not out for 
complete license to live a life of satisfaction of instincts 
and wayward impulses. I am with those who have no fear 
that the Freudian doctrine in its popular form is influenc- 
ing the pattern of their lives to any great extent. They 
are searching, they are experimenting, but they know 
what they are looking for—a purpose, or object in life, 
which shall make living worthwhile and life its own jus- 
tification. 


MOBILIZING THE HOME FOR MENTAL 
HEALTH 
Margaret Gray Blanton, Child Psychologist, 
Minneapolis, Minnesota 

The profession of parenthood is under fire. From 
every quarter comes criticism, and much of this criticism 
is destructive rather than constructive. Possibly this is 
because the study of these phases of human behavior is 
comparatively recent and relatively little data has been 
accumulated. It is easy to see that the home has often 
failed. It is more difficult to see wherein the home might 
be modified to make it a success. The parent sees the re- 
sult of his failures and rushes to science for a panacea, 
thus in his turn postponing the day when the data— 
slowly accumulating—can be made available. There is 
no panacea for the problem of social adjustment because 
the problem itself is kinetic. It does not, in the vernacu- 
lar, “stay put.” 

In the problem of behavior we must study the obvious 
causes because it is in the daily grind of obvious and un- 
dramatic situations that the habitual actions of the child 
are laid down. The patterns laid down in the perform- 
ance of the commonplace control in all the situations of 
life. But the study of the obvious is dull work. It is easier 
to sit in an armchair and say what should be taking place 
in the mind of the child than laboriously to study and 
record it. There is nothing very thrilling about studying 
the way, for instance, in which the corner of the table is 
constructed with regard to its possible effect on the capac- 


33 


34 INTELLIGENT PARENTHOOD 


ity of the child in learning to walk. It is much more dra- 
matic to state general principles and then to work in 
something that has a tremendous social appeal. But the 
students of human behavior must make something com- 
parable to a microscopic study of the environment of the 
individual and his reaction to it. It is the work of the 
psychiatrist, the psychologist, and the pediatrician to 
study microscopically all the small details of living. A 
personality change is an important thing in the life of the 
individual, but it may be caused by nothing more dra- 
matic than a tack in the shoe. It is the work of the dra- 
matist to deal with broad generalizations and to present 
to society the beautiful fabric as it is eventually worked 
out. But the adult who has the training of a child in 
charge must learn to make haste slowly and to sift evi- 
dence. 

This slow sifting of the environment for the causative 
gold has been retarded by another factor—the willingness 
of scientists and of parents to hide behind the old con- 
ception of “instinctive” behavior. It is certainly safer 
from the standpoint of the practical necessity of modify- 
ing behavior to assume that the human being has only one 
instinctive drive, a sort of urge to keep going. Whatever 
the exact classification may be in the actual process of 
training and retraining, this, it seems to me at least, is the 
only safe assumption, for it throws the whole burden of 
training for mental health on the environmental factors, 
which are after all the only modifiable ones. 

This necessitates the elimination of continued hiding 
behind the word “heredity” also. Different nervous sys- 
tems, to be sure, react in different ways to the same stim- 
uli, but here again in the final analysis, training is the fac- 


CHILD, HOME, AND COMMUNITY 35 


tor on which we may lay our hands. In the final analysis 
it does not matter what there is in the way of heredity 
because the child is here, and its heredity is, so to speak, 
unavoidable. Heredity is the problem of the eugenicist; 
the problem of the mental hygienist and of the parent is 
the individual in front of him. The person who is being 
dealt with is the child whose little mouth must be wiped 
off, or who is in the process of learning to eat spinach, or 
being taught to mind. It is the actual human being who 
must be mobilized for mental hygiene. And with the indi- 
vidual in front of you, the question is not some theoretic 
discussion of the instincts nor heredity, but “What are 
you going to do with him?” 

Immediately someone says, “I have two children 
brought up under identical environment who are totally 
unlike. How can training or environment be the thing 
that determines this?” And we are brought back to see 
wherein the difference does lie. If there are as many as 
two children in the family, they constitute part of the 
environment for each other. Each constitutes part of his 
own environment. You yourself are part of your own 
environment. Think how much your own presence modi- 
fies your own home even for you. 

In addition to this, there are certain emotional 
stresses that operate in regard to one child and not the 
other. I have in mind a case of a mother, very anxious for 
her first baby. She looked forward to its birth with great 
longing. Her father had just died. She saw in this child 
something to compensate for her tremendous loss. Inside 
of a year after this baby’s birth, another child came and 
this second child, though desired, was not quite so eagerly 
longed for, and he was a little bit of a nuisance. The 


36 INTELLIGENT PARENTHOOD 


mother’s patience was not quite so inexhaustible. He had 
an unfortunate way of not eating his food quickly, and a 
number of little deviations in his behavior constituted a 
slight extra burden. Little by little he became a problem. 
It is obvious that the environment of these two children 
is not the same because of the difference in attitude of the 
mother and because this second child had always to con- 
tend with the older child which had been much desired, 
even excessively desired and looked forward to. When the 
mother says, “The first child minds like an angel, but I 
don’t know what in the world is the matter with the sec- 
ond child,” she is simply stating in other words that she 
is not conscious of the fact that her own emotional urges 
are affecting the children. 

It is certainly never safe to be didactic in regard to 
rules for establishing mental health. At first glance all 
human beings appear more or less alike; one is conscious 
only of similarities; but the more closely one looks, the 
greater the divergence. Truly in behavior as in other 
fields “‘one man’s food is another man’s poison.” 

But certain things seem with fair consistency to pro- 
duce bad results, and out of a large number of possible 
guiding rules, a few may be safely accepted for the better 
guiding of the child in the direction of mental health. 

The child must be permitted to be an individual.— 
This, of course, does not mean that he must not be made 
to mind or that he must not be under a fairly rigorous 
discipline in accordance with the needs of the group, but 
he must be permitted to develop along the lines of his own 
emotional individuality. Even in this democratic age the 
child is seen with great frequency who is being molded by 
the father and the mother to carry on the intellectual am- 


OEE af = 


CHILD, HOME, AND COMMUNITY 37 


bitions of the family—the child whose life is being 
mapped out for him in accordance with the psychological 
need of the parents rather than his own. Many families 
of wealth or special talent are attempting to found dynas- 
ties. This is very commonly met with in universities. The 
boy whose father is an engineer will be sent to the univer- 
sity to become an engineer whether he wishes it or not. 
Young folks who have families in which one profession 
dominates are often offered on the altar of that particular 
profession, or in some families where wealth has been at- 
tained, great emphasis will be put on the boys in the fam- 
ily carrying on the business. If this effort at establishing 
a caste system wasted only a few years of the young per- 
son’s life, it would not be so bad, but practically the drive 
from early childhood in the direction of this end thwarts 
the emotional development of the person. It is one of the 
commonest causes of a break in adjustment in the ado- 
lescent period. 

The child must not be used to finish out the life of the 
parent.—‘‘I wanted to study music all my life,” a mother 
says, “but I didn’t get to. What am I going to do about 
my daughter whom I want to be a musician and who won’t 
practice?” The question is not, “Why will the girl not 
practice?” but “Why should she?” Why should anyone 
labor at an art unless he is driven by the inner necessity 
for expression? Certainly it is not sufficient that they be 
motivated by the desire of the parent nor even by ambi- 
tion. The mother says, ‘“Maybe she will be sorry when 
she grows up if she didn’t practice.” On the other hand, 
maybe she will be glad. Perhaps she would rather dig in 
a garden or ride a bicycle or paint pictures. Why not let 


38 INTELLIGENT PARENTHOOD 


her find her own drive and not attempt to fulfil the unful- 
filled desires of the parent? 

To illustrate, there was once a very charming family, 
the father of which was a violinist of note. The elder 
brother was a violinist of note, and the eldest sister 
played the violin well. These three people died of influ- 
enza, leaving the mother and the younger girl. By the 
time this younger girl was old enough to hold the violin, 
it was understood that she must play the violin. Every 
drive in her environment said, “Violin.” She was not 
fitted for the violin, did not want to play it. Strangely 
enough this perverse young girl liked to cook, liked to 
wash dishes, liked the orderly details of housework. She 
felt constructive and satisfied when she was engaged in 
housework. But there was nothing for her but to play the 
violin! Her hands could not be put in dish water nor in 
dirt or dust. They must be saved for handling the bow. 
She was tied to the violin until her seventeenth year when 
she had a severe emotional breakdown. She was liberated 
from the necessity for studying the violin and her moth- 
er’s attitude with regard to her career changed, and now 
she is making a fairly successful adjustment on another 
basis. 

The child must not be used as a peg on which the pa- 
rents can hang an unsatisfied emotional life-——You know 
the apt but old story of the man who wrote the govern- 
ment with regard to the drafting of his son: “I don’t want 
my boy to be taken in the draft. I raised him for my 
own use.” This is an adequate attitude to have toward a 
mule but not toward a child, and yet it is fairly common. 
All of us are brought up with a sort of Cinderella belief 
in the happy ending. Apparently we come to adulthood 


CHILD, HOME, AND COMMUNITY 39 


believing that in marriage we will find a bed of roses 
rather than the field of battle, as Stevenson has described 
it. Often the person finding that marriage does not offer 
a complete satisfaction for the yearnings of the individual 
turns to the child, expecting it somehow to complete what 
is lacking. Here again as in marriage the parent is told 
that it is legal and to be expected that she will find a com- 
plete outlet. The literature teems with sentimentality 
with regard to the emotions to be felt by the parent when 
at last the child lies in her arms. It is no wonder that she 
expects that all of the frustrations of life will be over- 
come by this magic influx of emotions. She is going to 
“throw herself into’ this child, “wrap herself around” 
this child, experience enormous things in the emotional 
outpouring on this child; and if she does accomplish this, 
it is the way by which she may thwart the child in its own 
development. She learns eventually, if she is wise, that 
the only way that happiness can be accomplished by the 
individual is by living fully herself. What, after all, is 
the use of the individual in the natural scheme if to pro- 
duce another is all? What is needed in the world is not 
an endless chain of occupants on the earth; it is human 
beings. Each has not only a right but also a duty to live 
individually. Reproduction does not in itself discharge 
all obligations to the race. A conviction of this on the 
part of the parent frees the child to live healthfully also. 
“T can’t let my baby leave home,” wails the mother of a 
last grown daughter. “Other children have gone and 
that’s all right, but I can’t give up my baby.” 

In kindergarten work for the re-education of nervous 
_ children, we often see this factor operating very early. 
We see children as early as three and four already the 


40 INTELLIGENT PARENTHOOD 


victims of “nervous breakdown.” A lovely boy of four 
was brought to the kindergarten one summer. He was 
precocious in size and intelligence, very alert and strong, 
dressed up in a little sailor suit with the name of a ship on 
his cap, his long, blond hair sweeping his shoulders. He 
was led into the kindergarten by both parents—one on 
each side, anxiously gripping his hand. This boy had 
come after ten years of childlessness on the part of the 
parents, and they were so afraid that something might 
happen to that little bit of future that they just watched 
him every single minute. They told me they thought there 
was something I ought to know about his behavior. I sig- 
nified my willingness to listen, but they stressed it again. 
“This is something very special,’ they said, with much 
the tone and manner that they would have used if he had 
had hydrophobia. Finally brought to the point, they said, 
“He kicks.” Hedged about by parental love and anxiety 
this boy was merely utilizing his one technique for con- 
quering the environment. 

It was necessary to teach this boy through a rational 
process that kicking was neither right nor wrong—it was 
simply a social inconvenience—and it was necessary to 
loosen from him as far as possible the octopus-like tenta- 
cles of his parents’ emotions. 

Children have a right to know the truth.—This is 
usually interpreted that they must know the truth about 
birth, and of course this is extremely important, but they 
must also know the other facts about life, about illness 
and unhappiness and death. There is a queer prevalent 
idea that the child can be protected from the facts of life. 
I do not know why it does not occur to people that chil- 
dren are continually shocked by the disappearance of 


CHILD, HOME, AND COMMUNITY 41 


people from their midst. It is hard to realize why people 
should not always have felt that the child must be told 
something about this important matter. In this connec- 
tion a mother once told me that she had told her child 
about death, and it had been extremely disturbing to the 
child, who henceforth refused to go to sleep until she was 
exhausted. It seems that what had happened was this: 
The child had come in after playing with a little girl whose 
mother had just died and had said, “Mother, what hap- 
pens to you when they put you in the big, round hole in 
the ground?” The mother said, “Dearest, I will tell you 
all about it. They don’t put you in a big, round hole; they 
put you in a long, narrow one. They fold your little hands 
and put a flower in them, and it is just as though you are 
asleep. Then they close the box and nail the top and put 
you in the ground.” The child had the same reaction that 
you or I would have had. Premature burial is premature 
burial, whether the hole be long and narrow or big and 
round! Suppose every time you went to sleep you were 
not certain but what someone might come along and put 
a lily in your hand and put you in a nailed box and put 
you in the ground! It is very necessary in giving informa- 
tion of any sort to a child that we study the limitations of 
the child’s experience. We have associative resources and 
knowledge on which to base conclusions, but it has not. 
The child must be able to find security in constructive 
discipline-—The parent and all the adults in the child’s 
environment must be willing to decide on what traits they 
wish to develop in the child and must work toward that 
end. A child cannot be “picked on” all morning in a way 
_ to make him afraid and fearful and pacifistic, and then be 
expected to be bold and brave and game in the afternoon 


42 INTELLIGENT PARENTHOOD 


when it comes to a knock-down blow. There have to be 
fairly definite ideas of personality traits for which one 
wishes in the child, and the discipline must be aimed at 
their establishment. 


The community is not adequately cared for medically 
in which it is not just as easy to have a child studied as an 
integrated human being as it is for him to be studied as a 
broken arch or a non-functioning lung. There must be 
places, child-guidance clinics, into which the child can be 
brought. It should be just as easy to have an effort made 
to ‘“‘pluck out a rooted sorrow’ as to pluck out a tonsil. 
The child-guidance clinic aims to study the conflict be- 
tween the child and his environment and to help him to 
adjust. It should make an effort to explain to the child 
his environment—a service of which the child is often 
greatly in need. Very often indeed he does not under- 
stand what all of this pother of living is about. Why 
should he obey? Why should he study? He asks these 
questions, and he has a right to the best answer that can 
be given. The child must be helped to motivate himself 
if he is to have mental health, to find something inside 
himself which helps him attain the cultural level of our 
social organization rather than have it imposed on him 
from outside. 

The second service of the child-guidance clinic must 
be the psychological rehabilitation of the family. Not all 
parents realize that very often their own conflicts with 
each other as human beings are fundamental factors in 
the child’s behavior disorders, and this is true no matter 
how well the trouble is “concealed” from the child. Per- 
haps it would be better if these clinics were called family- 


CHILD, HOME, AND COMMUNITY 43 


guidance clinics because that would be nearer the truth 
as regards the technique necessarily used. The clinics 
should, if possible, help the families, especially the moth- 
er, to discover more satisfactory social outlets. 

It seems to me that only the most superficial observa- 
tion justifies the statement that parents neglect their chil- 
dren and are not interested in them. We at least do not 
meet with the parent of his type. On the contrary, the pa- 
rents with whom we come in contact are overanxious, dis- 
turbed, and full of the feeling that through lack of infor- 
mation they are not doing the best for their child that is 
possible. 

On the whole, the thing that seems most needed by 
parents is a bit of optimism. I don’t mean ‘Pollyanna,’ 
for that, of course, is infantilism, not optimism. Pessim- 
ism, on the other hand, is just as destructive; it is unsub- 
limated adolescence. It seems to me that we are badly in 
need of the capacity to take ourselves as a civilization 
with just a grain of salt. The world has rocked along for 
a good long time, and it isn’t likely to wabble on its hinges 
because you or I or the children in our care cannot accom- 
plish as individuals some definite thing. Perhaps after 
all what is most needed is a sense of humor and perspec- 
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THE NEED OF CONTINUOUS HEALTH 
SUPERVISION 


Dr. Caroline Hedger, Elizabeth McCormick Memorial Fund 


It seems to me that trying to prove the need of con- 
tinuous health supervision is like trying to prove that a 
straight line is the shortest distance between two points, 
because, as a matter of fact, we all know that we have not 
health, and we all know the loss from lack of health and 
the need of health, and we know that some way this pro- 
gram of health has to be gotten across, and there seems no 
other way but to pay attention to it, which is really, fun- 
damentally, health supervision. 

I am not going to try to prove that we need health 
supervision to this audience. There is not a person in this 
audience who does not know it. I am going to try to speak 
a little bit of the weak spots in this line of health super- 
vision, and what we can do to strengthen it. 

Perhaps we ought, in the beginning, to understand 
each other, with a definition of what health supervision is. 
I am going to begin with a definition of what it is not. 
One spring day some years ago a medical friend of mine 
who had married a little bit late, and achieved a very 
cherished child, came to visit me. It was a nice, warm, 
sunshiny morning, so we sat out on the front step and the 
child happened to sneeze. My friend had a large black 
bag with her, such as women then carried. She dived 
down into this bag and brought out something and rubbed 
it on the child’s forehead. Then she dived down into the 
bag again and brought out something which she put up 


47 


48 INTELLIGENT PARENTHOOD 


the child’s nose, and the third time, to my surprise, she 
went into the capacious bag and brought out something 
that she put on the child’s tongue. I have often wondered 
how that child came to maturity under the conditions un- 
der which she was being cared for. Do not for a moment 
imagine that that was health supervision. That was the 
picture of an old hen with one chick. 

This health supervision that I want to speak to you 
about is a positive program. It is not a program of fear 
and anxiety. It is a co-operative program. It can be done 
alone, in my belief, by no one of the factors that surround 
the child, and it has to be done from many angles. 

At the moment it seems to me that the greatest stress 
in this supervision of health falls upon the parents, the 
physicians, and the psychologist, with the schools and the 
organized health forces of the community running a close 
second, and being perhaps more intimately concerned 
with prevention of injury. 

What is this health supervision? Where are we tak- 
ing the child? We are not taking this child to health as an 
end; we are not building Greek athletes, nor especially 
prize-winning children for the county fair. Nor are we 
in the last analysis necessarily building a winning foot- 
ball team. We are bringing that child through to its most 
perfect growth; its thoroughgoing development in many 
lines; its usefulness; its satisfaction; and in addition to 
these aims of any health program, we have to have a 
time element in this dealing with the child. That child 
has to be built for the long haul. It cannot be built for 
this grade, or this day, or this year, or this achievement. 
It is for the long haul, the difficult long haul of citizenship. 

There came this February an illustration of one of 


HEALTH 49 


the first needs of health supervision in the February 6 
number of the Journal of the American Medical Associa- 
tion, to which I should like to call your attention, in which 
is a careful and scientific study of 1,000 maternal deaths. 
You will find there food for a great deal of thought in 
health supervision. 

Fifty-eight per cent of these one thousand dead moth- 
ers died of childbed fever, a preventable disease; of con- 
vulsions, a largely preventable disease; and of hemor- 
rhage, usually considered a preventable disease. Thirty- 
nine per cent of these one thousand dead mothers had had 
no health supervision whatever through pregnancy, and 
89 per cent of these dead mothers had had no augsiate 
prenatal care. 

There is a point for health supervision. 

These authors also state that neomortality, that is, 
the mortality of the little newborn baby (and as you 
know, the first week of life is the most dangerous), in in- 
fants can be cut down, apparently as the result of health 
supervision, about 50 per cent. In such a program of 
health supervision as is indicated by this need, there can 
be put in many by-products. For instance, we could have 
the possibility of teaching methods of preserving breast- 
feeding for the normal period of nine months. We could 
have various problems of care of the infant taught at the 
same time. That would make it a very profitable form of 
health supervision, besides the actual saving of maternal 
and infant life. 

The field of infant health is now at a point where we 
can see the results of health supervision. Our own low 
death-rate, seventy-four per thousand, here in Chicago is 
due to the fine work of our organized health forces, our 


50 INTELLIGENT PARENTHOOD 


health department, our Infant Welfare Society, and the 
pediatricians of high standards and training who have 
altered some of the conditions around the child, so that we 
have a lower death-rate. And they have, in addition, as- 
sisted the mother in the supervision that has had a tre- 
mendous influence upon the life and well-being of other 
infants. But beyond infancy the trail is a bit harder, and 
it is perfectly logical, because the child’s growth is less 
spectacular, he grows more slowly, his death-rate is lower, 
and parents have not until very recently had any keen 
idea of the relation of these preschool children, for in- 
stance, to future nutritional health. 

In nutritional work it is extremely interesting to get 
this absence of interest in this preschool age. You bring 
one of these poor little malnourished children up in school, 
and you say to the mother, “Has this child always been 
skinny?” “Oh, no, he was a nice baby; he weighed seven 
and a half, or eight pounds.” And you say, “How long 
has he been skinny?” “Well, when he began to run 
around he began to get skinny, and he has been skinny 
ever since,” and the mother apparently has never corre- 
lated that lack of good nutrition in the child with that ac- 
cident of nutrition at the early age. 

There are many problems. There is the relation of 
the health of this preschool child to organic health later, 
because of the incidents of focal infections; there is the 
problem of resistance, which we know very little about, 
but which is one of the things to which we must look in the 
future. 

We have not seen, in spite of this fine presentation 
this morning, and do not yet see as a mass, the relation- 
ship of early emotional states to later nervous levels. This 


HEALTH 51 


literature is developing, and the behavior clinic is dealing 
with children who show some problems in behavior. 

Of course that is the first step, and’in time it will get 
its message in to the people who are around the little 
child, so that there will be a program of prevention, be- 
cause it is quite a costly and troublesome thing to iron 
some of these queer kinks out of these little personalities 
and put in fresh kinks that run in the right direction. It is 
very much cheaper and easier and more efficacious to get 
the right kink into that little personality first. 

The positive health building of the school child only 
now appears above the horizon. Our work so far has been 
largely corrective, which is necessary. That child’s de- 
fects have to be dealt with to clear the field for positive 
health. We have as yet hardly gotten into the promotion 
of good posture by well fitted, and frequently fitted, seats. 
We shall awake to the fact that, again, it is easier to keep 
the child’s back straight than to straighten it. We have 
not got that far yet. We have as yet hardly seized upon 
the fundamental use of athletics as health-builders in con- 
tradistinction to the winning team. And we have almost 
left untouched the relationship of the various school 
stresses of the child’s life—for instance, examinations. 
They are stresses that affect the mental and physical 
health of the child. Maybe you think I am drawing a long 
bow when I think, or speak, of examinations as the stress 
of the school child. I wish you could see a class of little 
children who are trying to be built up; and see what hap- 
pens to them on examination week, if you think that thing 
is free from stress and strain. As a matter of fact, maybe 
there have to be examinations, maybe we have to get the 
child so he can stand examinations. I am not an educator, 


52 INTELLIGENT PARENTHOOD 


I do not know that, but I am sure that we have no clear 
vision as yet of the problem of positive health in the child 
in relation to these other things of the school that we take 
so as a matter of course. All this is to be a thing of the 
future, a thing of organizations like this one that give 
thoroughgoing and continued study to our problems. 

Closely allied to any plan of health supervision is, of 
course, the content of public health education in the 
school. It is as yet entirely unsolved, though there are 
people in this room who are spending their days at it, and 
doubtless we shall have it. I, of course, am not fitted to 
speak on the content of health education for children, but 
I am sure of some things that should not be, and I want to 
recount something that happened to me in a little school 
in Iowa some years ago that will illustrate some of my 
points. 

This school had won a banner for some sort of 
achievement—I believe along health lines. I was to meet 
the P.T.A., and it was a great day, and the school felt that 
it wanted to do its share in this festivity, so they had taken 
a row of these little steps, little children, seven, eight, and 
nine years old, and had taught them to speak a little piece 
about tuberculosis, and these little things said their piece 
about tuberculosis. 

I received a great deal of information that I don’t 
usually carry with me on that day. I learned then, and 
have never forgotten since, because I was told at least 
ten times that Koch found the tubercle bacillus in 1882. 
I think my information is still correct. I was told some- 
thing, I believe, about the open window. I was not given 
by one of those little children the fact that good nutrition 
and right living makes us resistant to that little plant that 


HEALTH 53 


we all meet every day, but I was told one fact that has 
stuck, among the other information, about the tubercle 
bacillus—every single one of these little steps said, like 
a little parrot, “It multiplies by dividing.” So it does, 
but what does that mean in our young lives, and what did 
it mean to those children. It means absolutely nothing. 
They do not multiply by dividing, they multiply by multi- 
plying, and they divide by dividing. 

That little experience has made me think a great deal 
abcut the field of health education which follows directly 
after health supervision, and I am sure that we must not 
teach fear. I am sure that we must not teach disease. I 
am sure that we must teach a positive psychology of right 
living that will build resistance and make us face up 
toward the sunshine and forget the germs that perhaps 
are behind. 

What are the aims of health supervision? What can 
we set as a reasonable end of health supervision? Growth! 
Continuous and regular growth in the child. It is a very 
complex thing, with many factors. Heredity! How much 
we do not know. There is a Kentucky woman in this 
room who gave me a fact about growth that has made me 
very doubtful about hereditary factors in growth. She 
told me her father was a horse-breeder, and that he had 
to import his Shetland ponies about every three genera- 
tions because they grew up on the lime and blue grass of 
Kentucky, and grew into horses. That has thrown a little 
doubt into my mind about hereditary factors of growth, 
but of course we do not know. 

Glandular factors in growth are only beginning to be 
elaborated by men like McCarrison who says that on diet 
depends glandular secretion; and we medical people be- 


54 INTELLIGENT PARENTHOOD 


lieve that glandular secretion has a lot to do with growth. 
If we really get interested in growth we will have to take 
counsel with our friends who know about diet very care- 
fully. It is part of our health supervision, and of course 
there are a great many of us to whom it seems as if nutri- 
tion itself had something to do with growth. It is largely 
an unexplored field, but I believe that one aim of health 
supervision is the optimum growth of the child, to see that 
he keeps growing and that nothing happens to him to pre- 
vent that growth. 

Nutrition seems to me a perfectly normal aim of 
health supervision, sufficient for growth, sufficient to make 
the income necessary for the child. Certainly the nutri- 
tion of the child has to do with one of the fundamentals 
of health in the child which is the highest possible inter- 
est, and I am sure that nutrition has something to do with 
that great problem which is one of the major themes of 
this convention, and that is the nervous balance in result- 
ing behavior. This nervous balance, again, relates to 
glandular secretion, nutritional values, and environments, 
and this makes a sort of an interwoven thing, as Dr. Abt 
says: you cannot separate out any one thing. 

These common denominators of nutrition—glandular 
secretion and nervous balance—make an all-round health 
supervision an absolute necessity. And of course, in all 
this aim of health supervision must be considered the con- 
servation of the reproductive life of the child. 

This all-round and interdependent development de- 
mands a co-operative program in health supervision. In 
my judgment no one person can do it alone. The parent, 
the physician, the psychologist, and the educator have to 
make a close corporation around that child, and at the 


HEALTH 55 


moment, I believe the thing that they all need most is the 
ideal of a well child. I believe they ought to see that 
child as a vital, growing thing, a beautiful thing, a thing 
developing into a social being, a flexible body, and an ad- 
justable nervous system, a serviceable unit of the future. 

Undoubtedly we have not had enough discontent with 
the child as he exists today. If we each one of us here 
went into our schools and looked over our children we 
would see in those schools a mass of material with which 
we should be discontented, and which we should little by 
little build or supervise into a more efficient and beautiful 
childhood. 

The parent has to be discontented with his own child, 
if it is not the best. That is very hard—the child is so 
close to us and so precious to us. It is terribly hard to be 
discontented with our own child, but, honestly, wouldn’t 
you love him just as well if he looked like something hu- 
man and had some meat on him? I cannot see but what 
you would be just as fond of him, and somehow or other, 
you have got to get that child off far enough so that 
you can see whether you have the best, and this confer- 
ence is one effort in that direction. I believe that in the 
whole program of the future the parent especially must 
keep clearly in mind the fact that the physical is the basis 
of the other. That is not materialism. That is just ordi- 
nary observation. You do not get the most perfect shin- 
ing of your spirit, and you do not get the most perfect 
functioning of your mental organ unless there is balance 
in that body, and you especially do not get the lasting 
quality in the child. 

I believe that the parent must set for himself stand- 
ards of physical health supervision, with the aid of peo- 


56 INTELLIGENT PARENTHOOD 


ple who know, the medical profession. Perhaps the pa- 
rent can be discontented, but he cannot solve the physical 
problems of the child—only the physician, only the psy- 
chologist, only the trained person can do that. 

Our physicians and our psychologists have to come 
in to this partnership on the basis of giving all of us who 
are interested in the child the capital of the child with 
which we have to work. We doctors and teachers would 
not think of willingly and knowingly injuring a child, 
and yet we know so little of the actual capital of that 
child, and we can so easily go over, in some way, the 
threshold that makes for normal health and normal de- 
velopment. 

This means, of course, far more thorough work than 
the community has ever done with the child, and yet I 
have a dream of a co-operation for the child in the school, 
perhaps, in which all these skilled people set down in 
black and white the kind of material we have to deal with. 
Is this child Al mentally and physically in a hereditary 
way? If so, he can take a hard program. Is he B3 men- 
tally or physically, or both? If so, then that load has to 
be adjusted. 

Of course the health supervision in the school means 
the drawing-out of the powers of that individual child, 
whatever they may be—any vocational, or educational, or 
especial line that can be discovered. Of course we are 
only at the threshold of a supervision that would put that 
child into the right job, and you heard what happens to — 
children in the wrong job this morning. This health su- 
pervision relates very closely to that thing that was given 
you this morning—getting the round peg into a round hole 
and the square peg into a square hole. You cannot have 


HEALTH 57 


health aside from that in the highest terms, but it seems 
to me that in this search for the real field of a child’s ac- 
tivity, we have to clearly say to ourselves, “Here, we are 
going to find out, if we can, what the capital of this child 
is; we are going to develop his capabilities so far as in us 
lies, but the one thing we are not going to do is to in jure 
that material, because we have to keep in mind this long 
haul. We cannot take out of that child in educational, 
cultural, social, athletic ways, the nutrition and the nery- 
ous balance that is going to last that child through the 
long haul, and through a long life.” 

Of course the field of the adolescent has not been 
touched. We know very little about it. We have done no 
health work in the adolescent field. We are putting very 
heavy stresses on that terminal period of development, 
and health supervision of the adolescent.is a thing of the 
future. I wish to say that I believe continuous health su- 
pervision before and after birth is a necessity, that it has 
to be along positive lines. It has to be accompanied by 
positive health education, by education of parents, which 
this conference represents, and it has to be definitely on 
the line of the individual child and his usefulness to the 
future. 


A NEW DISCOVERY OF AN OLD POWER— 
SUNLIGHT 
Dr. Martha M. Eliot, Director of Child Hygiene Division, 
Department of Labor (co-operating with Children’s 
Bureau on Research, New Haven, Connecticut) 

The treatment of disease with sunlight, known today 
as heliotherapy, is as old as the science of medicine, but 
the scientific use of sunlight for certain forms of tubercu- 
losis and for rickets is as new as the twentieth century. If 
we look into historical medical literature we find, now and 
then, references to sun baths for the sick, but we find al- 
most no mention of prevention of disease with sunlight. - 
On the Island of Cos in about the year 400 B.c. Hippoc- 
rates, the father of medicine, advised sun baths and built 
a temple to Aesculapius, the god of medicine, to serve as 
a solarium for his patients. From the time of Hippocrates 
until the beginning of the Dark Ages, Greek and Roman 
physicians continued to recommend sun baths for the cure 
of disease. In modern times heliotherapy has been prac- 
ticed more or less in France since the end of the eigh- 
teenth century. The first specific use of sunlight for the 
treatment of tuberculosis was made by the physicians of 
Lyons about 1840, but it was not put on a sound scientific 
basis until 1903 when Rollier opened his clinic in Switzer- 
land. Today many hundreds of children and adults with 
bone and gland tuberculosis go to Switzerland to be 
treated with sun baths. After many years of experience 
Rollier has established a system of graduated sun baths 
which have as their ultimate goal thorough pigmentation 


58 


HEALTH 59 


of the skin of the whole body and not sunburn. The alti- 
tude in Switzerland insures coolness of the air as well as 
great intensity of sunlight. The heat of the sun is useful 
in heliotherapy only in the winter and must be avoided at 
midday in summer even in the mountains. The best helio- 
therapy consists of light baths and not of heat baths, and 
may be practiced at any altitude or in any place where the 
sunlight is clear. This method of treating tuberculosis be- 
came so successful in Rollier’s clinic that it has been imi- 
tated in all parts of Europe and this country. Switzerland 
is no longer the only place where tuberculous children 
may be seen playing naked in the sun or lying on outdoor 
sun porches. In many parts of this country, whether at 
the seashore or in the mountains, just such scenes are 
common today. 

Rollier did not limit his use of sunlight to treatment 
of tuberculosis. In 1910 a school was opened under his 
supervision where the influence of sunlight in the preven- 
tion of tuberculosis could be demonstrated. That this 
“school in the sun” was a success is shown by the ever 
increasing number of so-called preventoria which are 
springing up in this country for children known to have 
been exposed to tuberculosis. If sunlight is good for the 
cure of tuberculosis in older children, it is also certainly 
good for its prevention in younger ones. In 1916 a small 
volume was published in France by Dr. G. Léo urging the 
use of heliotherapy for the prevention of tuberculosis in 
infancy.’ Simple straightforward directions were given 
for sun baths for babies, but apparently they attracted 

*Gontraud Léo, Les tout-petits arc soleil; Vhygiéne par 


Vhéliothérapie dans la premiére enfance. Paris: A. Maloine et 
fils, 1916. ; 


60 INTELLIGENT PARENTHOOD 


little attention either in Europe or in this country. In rec- 
ommending heliotherapy for infants, Léo thought only of 
its value in preventing tuberculosis. Little did he realize 
that in so doing he was advising a procedure which would 
also prevent another and more common disease of infancy. 

To many people today heliotherapy implies only the 
cure or prevention of tuberculosis. Our conception, how- 
ever, of the value of heliotherapy must become wider and 
the cure and prevention of rickets as well as that of tuber- 
culosis be included in it. Recent medical investigation has 
shown that sunlight has an absolutely specific effect on 
the development and cure of rickets and is indispensable 
for the normal growth of infants. Rickets as a chronic 
nutritional disturbance has been known to physicians for 
over 250 years, but the importance of sunlight in its cure 
and prevention has only been known definitely for the 
past seven years. The true value of sunlight in relation to 
rickets was first suggested by an Englishman in 1890 and 
reiterated in 1912 by a French investigator, but actual 
proof of its value was not obtained until 1919 when X-ray 
photographs of the bones demonstrated that rickets could 
be cured by ultra-violet radiations. Two years later 
(1921), investigators showed that cure could be brought 
about by sunlight alone. 

For over a century and a half cod-liver oil has been 
known to exert a favorable influence in rickets. Proof that 
cod-liver oil had a specific curative action in rickets, ap- 
parently similar to that of sunlight, was obtained in this 
country in 1921 and the cure demonstrated by X-ray 
photographs of the bones of rachitic children. As a result 
of even more recent experiments it is probable that the 
action of sunlight and cod-liver oil in the cure of rickets 


HEALTH 61 


is the same and that the oil from the liver of the cod fish 
has acquired its antirachitic power from the sunlight 
passing through the water to the fish’ or to the plants 
eaten by the fish. It has been definitely shown that vege- 
table oils, milk, green vegetables, and grains may also 
acquire this antirachitic power if treated with ultra-violet 
radiation. When cod-liver oil is ingested by the infant, 
radiant energy is probably somehow liberated, to regulate 
metabolism and cure or prevent rickets. Thus cod-liver 
oil may truly be called ‘bottled sunshine.” 

Sunlight, as we see it, is only a very small part of the 
radiations given off from the sun. When the visible light 
from the sun passes through a prism it is broken up into 
its component parts to form the well-known spectrum of 
colors, red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and violet. Be- 
yond each end of this visible spectrum there are invisible 
radiations at the red end, the heat waves, at the violet 
end, the ultra-violet rays. The ultra-violet radiations are 
few in number compared to the heat and visible light, but 
it is these rays which are of such importance to animal 
life, destroying bacteria, stimulating the healing process 
in tuberculosis, and preventing or healing rickets. The in- 
tensity of these ultra-violet radiations as they reach the 
earth’s surface varies greatly with the season of the year 
and with the condition of the atmosphere. In the north 
temperate zone the intensity is greatest when the sun has 
reached the most northern point in its circuit, that is about 
June 21, and least when the sun has reached the most 
southern point, December 21. During the day it has been 
shown that the intensity is greatest between ten and two 
o'clock. If the day is cloudy or if there is smoke or dust in 
the atmosphere, the intensity of the radiation is greatly 


62 INTELLIGENT PARENTHOOD 


diminished. Ultra-violet radiation is less, therefore, in 
congested smoky cities than in the open country. When 
the radiations from the sun pass through solid substances 
certain rays are filtered out. Black silk, for instance, will 
permit the passage of heat rays, but is opaque to the visi- 
ble and ultra-violet rays. Window glass permits the pas- 
sage of visible rays and heat rays but is opaque to the 
ultra-violet rays. By dressing ourselves in heavy clothing 
and by living behind glass windows we are depriving our- 
selves effectually of most of these valuable ultra-violet 
radiations. It is only when the rays strike directly on the 
bare skin that they can be absorbed by the body. Pig- 
mentation of the skin is the evidence that the body is 
reacting to the radiations. Ultra-violet radiations of great 
intensity may be produced artificially by a mercury vapor 
quartz lamp or carbon are lamp and may be used thera- 
peutically as sunlight is used, though in smaller doses. 
The practical use of sunlight in the treatment of tu- 
berculosis has today been very well established, and is 
also being very generally recommended as a prophylactic 
measure for the so-called pre-tuberculous child or child 
who has been exposed to tuberculosis. The therapeutic 
use of both sunlight and artificial ultra-violet light for the 
child with severe rickets is now well recognized, but the 
use of sunlight as a preventive measure in infancy not 
only for tuberculosis, but more important still for rickets, 
has been overlooked until the last few years. Even now 
sun baths for babies are looked upon askance, and the 
real need for them is not appreciated. Complete or even 
partial sun baths are reserved for those children who are 
unfortunate enough to have become diseased. Little 
thought has been given to preventing these diseases when 


HEALTH 68 


the child is still an infant. The need to prevent tubercu- 
losis among young infants and young children is not gen- 
erally recognized. The death-rate frdm tuberculosis at 
this age is too high and the number of children who ac- 
quire the disease before their third year too great. Sun 
baths may help the child build up resistance to tubercu- 
losis by preventing many of the common respiratory in- 
fections, by helping to improve nutrition and muscular 
development, and, perhaps, by preventing rickets. 

The need to prevent rickets among young infants 
cannot be emphasized too much. In the central and north- 
ern states rickets in a greater or less degree is a nearly 
universal condition among young infants, whether breast 
or artificially fed.. Approximately one-third of all city 
children show either moderate or severe deformities of 
rickets. It is true that the most severe cases are found 
among the dark-skinned races, but mild and moderate 
degrees of the disease occur among the fair-skinned races 
to an extent not realized until recently when the X-ray 
has been used to help make the diagnosis. If these fair- 
skinned infants receive antirachitic treatment, that is, if 
they are taken outdoors into the direct sunlight and if 
they are given the antirachitic factor in cod-liver oil, the 
mild degree of rickets demonstrable by X-ray will not de- 
velop into a more severe degree. Dark-skinned infants 
probably need longer exposure to the sunlight and per- 
haps larger doses of cod-liver oil to attain the same degree 
of control of rickets as fair-skinned infants. This may be 
due to the fact that the natural pigmentation of their 
skin, acquired as protection from the intense sunlight of 
the south, overprotects them from the northern sunlight. 
If rickets is not allowed to advance beyond a slight de- 


64 INTELLIGENT PARENTHOOD 


gree there are probably few if any bad results. It is the 
rickets which is allowed to go untreated which carries de- 
formities in its wake and with which anemia, bronchitis, 
pneumonia, and sometimes convulsions are associated. 
Bony deformities of the extremities such as bow legs, 
severe knock-knees, and flat foot are to be deprecated be- 
cause they interfere with the correct use of the body; bony 
deformities of the chest are frequently associated with 
chronic bronchitis and recurring pneumonia; bony de- 
formities of the pelvic bones are responsible for a large 
proportion of difficult and operative deliveries for women 
in child birth, to say nothing of injuries to the infant dur- 
ing such difficult delivery. A large percentage of convul- 
sions of infants under one year of age is due to tetany, a 
condition associated with rickets. Babies with rickets are 
particularly prone to respiratory infections, to anemia, to 
malnutrition. If rickets can be controlled from its very 
incipiency in the first months of life these untoward re- 
sults will be avoided. 

The institution of sun baths for babies and young 
children in any American community is not easy because 
tradition and convention have been opposed to them for 
many generations. Climatic conditions in many parts of 
this country make warm clothing a necessity during the 
winter season. During the spring, summer, and fall, how- 
ever, babies and little children wear much more clothing 
than is necessary. One has only to take off a baby’s or a 
little child’s clothes and watch him play in the sun to 
know that it is convention and not instinct which demands 
clothes at this age. Tradition also says that sunlight may 
injure a baby’s eyes. If the baby’s face is turned so that 
the eyes look away from the sun or if the older child 


HEALTH 65 


wears a cotton shade hat in hot weather, the eyes will not 
be injured. Old traditions and conventions are hard to 
break. New traditions and conventions must be estab- 
lished by small groups, and slowly the rest of the com- 
munity will follow. 

The technique of the sun bath will vary somewhat 
according to locality, climate, season, weather, and facil- 
ities in the home. Sunlight is free to all and sun baths can 
be given to all babies at some season of the year. South- 
ern babies can have outdoor sun baths the year around. 
Northern babies are less fortunate, but even in our cli- 
mate partial sun baths can be given nearly all the year 
and complete sun baths all the summer months. In practi- 
cally all parts of the United States, preliminary outdoor 
sun baths can be started by the first of March. A corner 
of the yard or porch should be selected where the morn- 
ing sun shines warmly, but where the child will be pro- 
tected from the wind. Here the baby’s hands and face 
and head may be exposed to the sun for varying lengths 
of time beginning with five or ten or even fifteen minutes 
and increasing gradually during the month as the sun gets 
warmer. If the baby is turned first on one side and then 
on the other, both cheeks may be exposed without injury 
to the eyes. The hands may be exposed, at first, one at a 
time, later both together. The bonnet may be pushed 
daily further back until the whole head is exposed. In 
many parts of the country these preliminary sun baths 
may be started in February or even January. During these 
sun baths in early spring, sunburn need not be feared be- 
cause the intensity of the sunlight is not yet very great. 
Later in the season shorter exposures may be necessary at 
first. 


66 INTELLIGENT PARENTHOOD 


As the spring days get warmer, usually by the first 
of April, the area of the skin exposed to the sun may be 
increased by rolling up the sleeves to the elbow, for five 
or ten minutes. Each week thereafter the duration of the 
sun bath on head and arms may be increased five or ten 
minutes, the amount depending on the rapidity with which 
pigmentation takes place. Early in April, depending 
somewhat on the climate or weather, the stockings may be 
taken off, at first one at a time, later both together, for 
five or ten minutes each, thus exposing the leg and knee to 
the sun. The period of exposure of the legs must increase 
five or ten minutes weekly thereafter. By approximately 
the middle of May, when the baby’s arms and legs have 
become accustomed to the sun baths and are tanned, more 
of the body can be exposed. The jacket and dress may be 
taken off for five minutes each day for a week, thus ex- 
posing the shoulders and neck as well as the arms and 
legs. As with the arms and legs the period of exposure of 
the neck and shoulders should increase five to ten minutes 
each week. By the end of May the sun bath may be given 
with all clothes off except the band and diaper, and by 
the first or second week of June the baby may receive 
complete sun baths with no clothing. Care must be taken 
to gradually accustom each new part of the skin to the 
sunlight by starting with five-minute exposure and in- 
creasing by five or ten minute amounts each week. By the 
first of June the face, head, arms, and legs may be ex- 
posed for approximately an hour, whereas the complete 
sun bath including the trunk will only last five or ten 
minutes. By the end of June, however, the complete sun 
bath may be given for from one-half to a whole hour. 

Pigmentation of the skin and not sunburn is the end 


HEALTH 67 


for which to strive in giving sun baths to babies. No ab- 
solute rule can be laid down as to how long this will take. 
The baby with fair skin will require shorter exposures at 
first in order to avoid sunburn, but may be given more 
frequent sun baths, possibly twice or even three times a 
day in order to hasten pigmentation. The baby with dark 
hair and dark skin will pigment more rapidly and longer 
exposures can be safely given. Negro babies may have 
twice as long exposures as white babies. Older children 
can usually have longer initial exposures than young 
babies. A general schedule such as this may be followed 
fairly closely, but no schedule will serve for all babies and 
common sense must be used at all times to avoid sunburn. 

During the spring months sun baths are best given 
between ten and one, but during the hot summer months 
they should be given earlier in the morning between eight 
and ten. Once the child’s body has become well tanned he 
can play in the sun several hours, provided he wears a 
light cotton shade hat. During the extreme heat of July 
and August it is better that the child should play in the 
shade between ten and three. A child accustomed to com- 
plete sun baths in the summer can continue them late into 
the fall and can have partial sun baths on all sunny days 
in the winter. Outdoor sun baths may be started as de- 
scribed at any time during the spring, summer, or fall, 
but the duration of these initial exposures must depend on 
the season, those of the spring and fall being longer than 
those of July and August. 

In the northern states during the winter months from 
November to March it is often difficult to give outdoor sun 
baths to very young babies. The heat of the sunlight 
which we would so gladly dispense with in July and Aug- 


68 INTELLIGENT PARENTHOOD 


ust must be used to its greatest extent in winter and 
spring. It has been found that the temperature in winter 
may be forty or more degrees higher in the direct sunlight 
in a place protected from the wind than in the shade. 
Babies born in the winter should sleep as often as possible 
outdoors in the sun during the morning nap and the sun 
be allowed to shine on the cheeks and face. During these 
months, moreover, partial sun baths may be given to 
babies indoors lying inside an open sunny window. The 
window may be opened at the top or at the bottom, but it 
is important that the baby lie in the patch of sunlight 
which has come through the open space. During the in- 
door sun bath it is best to close the doors of the room to 
avoid drafts. The same technique may be used for the 
indoor sun bath as for the outdoor. Babies who have be- 
come accustomed to indoor sun baths in winter can begin 
outdoor sun baths in February or March. 

Sun baths need not be limited to babies. They should 
be continued throughout the early years of childhood. 
The more sunlight little children can receive the better 
will they withstand colds, infections, and contagious dis- 
eases. During the summer, many children are taken to the 
seashore or to the country where sun baths are easily 
given. On the beach wearing a sleeveless low neck bath- 
ing suit, or better still, a pair of bathing trunks, a little 
child can receive an ideal sun bath. After his body is once 
well tanned he can play several hours a day on the beach. 
In the country, however, or in the city, no one thinks of 
dressing a child in a bathing suit when he is playing in 
the fields or in the back yard. A pair of bathing trunks 
will serve as well for a sun bath in the country or in the 
city back yard as for a salt water bath at the sea or a fresh 


HEALTH 69 


water bath at the lake. Sun bathing is much more impor- 
tant than sea bathing or lake bathing, and has the great 
advantage of being everywhere accessible in summer. 
Sun bathing suits should allow as much skin as possible 
to be exposed and may consist of a thin, short, sleeveless, 
low-necked slip or romper or a simple set of sleeveless 
cotton underwear which will leave the arms and legs and 
neck bare. During the summer, clothes for children 
should be sleeveless and cut low in the neck. Bare legs 
and sandals should be the fashion from May until Octo- 
ber, and children should vie with one another as to which 
one gets the best coat of tan. Dr. Saleeby of London, a 
great advocate of sunshine for children, urges us in his 
excellent book on Sunlight and Health? not to let fashion 
dominate our choice of children’s clothes. 

Though heliotherapy is as old as mankind, its scien- 
tific application is almost as new as the century in which 
we live. Helio-prevention, if I may use a new word, is 
still more recent. Much of the success and popularity of 
sun baths will depend upon the enthusiasm with which 
small groups of parents welcome them for their children. 
All well children, whether strong or delicate, will benefit 
from sun baths properly regulated. If a child is not well, 
sun baths should be undertaken only under the direction 
of a physician, but in many instances better health will 
be coincident with the beginning of sun baths. Overen- 
thusiasm in the use of sunlight must be avoided. Benefit 
is received even during the slow preparatory period when 
the skin is beginning to pigment. Harm may be done by 
too much haste. The rules of the game are as follows: 


*C. W. Saleeby, M. D., Sunlight and Health. London: Nis- 
bet and Co., Ltd., 1923. 


70 INTELLIGENT PARENTHOOD 


First, to progress slowly, but regularly, starting with 
a few minutes and working up to two or three hours. 

Second, to watch for pigmentation of the skin, avoid- 
ing sunburn, and to increase the length of sun bath ac- 
cordingly. 

Third, to expose the arms and legs first and the body 
afterwards. 

Fourth, to use the morning sunlight of spring, sum- 
mer, and fall, and all the available sunlight of winter. In 
summer the head should be protected from the heat in the 
middle of the day. 

If these general rules are followed, sun baths may be 
given to children of any age. 


THE TIRED CHILD—RECOGNITION AND 
MANAGEMENT 
Dr. Max Seham, Professor of Pediatrics, 
University of Minnesota 

Fatigue is a condition much talked about and little 
understood. It is most intimately related with everyday 
life. All of us parents, teachers, industrial workers, and 
children suffer from it or are affected by it at some time 
or other, for short periods or for long. It is a sign of nor- 
mal health, yet also a symptom of disease. It is varied in 
its manifestations, yet simple of recognition. Yet as com- 
mon as it is, and as long as we have known about it, the 
nature of fatigue is still obscure. 

For fifty years the subject of fatigue has been studied 
in the laboratory by physiologists; for twenty years psy- 
chologists have attempted to produce artificial fatigue in 
the normal individual. More recently industrial fatigue 
has attracted the attention of investigators, but to date, 
as far as I know, there has been no comprehensive study 
of chronic fatigue in the school child. Yet there is no 
problem, so it seems to me, that is more closely associated 
with the health and happiness of the school child than the 
problem of chronic fatigue. 

How can we learn about chronic fatigue? When we 
first started to investigate this subject, when we first at- 
tempted to classify children on the basis of their efficiency 
for work, we naturally used the method which then was in 
vogue, namely, the so-called physiologic-psychological 
tests. We first used the so-called physical tests and then 

71 


72 INTELLIGENT PARENTHOOD 


the psychological tests, and finally a combination of the 
two. You probably know what these tests are. We found 
one definite and constant factor, namely, that there exists 
such a great individual variation in one and the same 
child at different times of performance, that motivation 
plays such a great réle in the output of work that these 
tests, these so-called “objective” tests, cannot be used for 
determining either the amount or the degree of fatigue. 

Let me cite two examples. First, a child, while riding 
a stationary bicycle, will do 10,000 footpounds at one sit- 
ting and at another sitting, on the same day, about 30,000 
footpounds! Which is the normal standard for this child? 
Which is his average physical capacity, 10,000 or 30,000 
footpounds? The same is true, if one attempts to inter- 
pret some of the psychological tests—those tests that the 
psychologists have used a great deal. In the foot balance 
test a child will be able to balance himself on the ball of 
his foot for three minutes; a minute later he will balance 
himself for, perhaps, ten minutes. Which is the average? 
Which is normal for that particular child? 

On the basis of our work, I think I am justified in 
concluding that to date there is no single objective psycho- 
physiologic test which can be used to determine either the 
amount or the degree of fatigue. What, then, can we use? 
How can we discover, first of all, the landmarks of fa- 
tigue, and how can we classify children on the basis of 
efficiency ? 

With no test to fall back on we were compelled to 
study the children as individual machines by means of 
their daily reactions to their activities. That is, we were 
compelled to inquire into the lives of the children, into 
their abilities and their disabilities, into their points of 


HEALTH 73 


view, their relationship to their environment, and their 
physical, mental, and emotional activity. To do this, we 
devised certain questionnaires. We used six different sets 
of questionnaires. 

The first was a questionnaire of health habits to be 
answered by the child; the second a corroborating ques- 
tionnaire of health habits, to be answered by the mother; 
the third a questionnaire of general efficiency to be an- 
swered by the child; fourth, a questionnaire of efficiency 
similar to the one for the child, answered by the mother; 
fifth, a questionnaire of efficiency to be answered by the 
room teacher; and sixth, a questionnaire of efficiency to be 
answered by the gymnasium teacher. 

You see, what we were aiming at through these ques- 
tions, which covered about 260 different points, was first 
to learn something more about the child than the tradi- 
tional examination of children reveals. Traditional medi- 
cine speaks of an enlarged heart, of a broken leg or arm, 
of diseased and infected tonsils, but it does not speak of 
the function of the body as a whole, of the combined work- 
ing effects of all the organs and systems; nor does it con- 
cern itself, to any great extent, with habits of living as a 
possible cause of disease. 

Secondly, we aimed to find a contrast in the efficiency 
and the health habits of normal children and those who 
are chronically subefficient. 

The answers to the questions revealed to us the fol- 
lowing points: First, there is no such thing as a perfect 
child. We had no child whose questionnaire was 100 per 
cent normal. I might say in passing that for grading we 
used a key, which was partly arbitrary, based upon a 
schedule of rational habits devised by us; on the other 


74 INTELLIGENT PARENTHOOD 


hand, it was based on a careful study of abnormal signs 
and symptoms. Each answer denoting an inadequate 
health habit or an abnormal sign of efficiency was marked 


with a check. In the answers of normal children we found 


on an average five inadequate health habits as against ten 
in abnormal children. Again, the health habits, as an- 
swered by the mother, ran four for normal and eight for 
abnormal children. 

In other words, the children who are suffering from 
chronic fatigue and chronic subefficiency had twice as 
many inadequate health habits as those whom we diag- 
nosed normal children. This, I think, indicates that hab- 
its of living play a réle in the production of fatigue. 

In the questionnaire of efficiency, answered by the 
child, we found five unfavorable signs in the normal chil- 
dren as compared to fourteen in abnormal children, an 
increase of over 100 per cent. The mother’s answers 
showed eight unfavorable for the normal as against seven- 
teen for the abnormal, and those of the room teacher nine 
as against twenty-one in abnormal children, about two 
and a half times as high. 

So much for the statistical side of our study. I think 
that our findings proved the value of the questionnaire 
method. Of course, it is true that the questionnaire meth- 
od has its pitfalls—if the questions are not asked in a 
specific, direct, concrete and objective way, one will re- 
ceive inaccurate answers. 

First, the specificity of questions: in ascertaining cer- 
tain health habits, as for instance, if one asks a child how 
much candy he eats, he may answer little or much. But if 
one asks him how many pieces of candy he eats daily, his 
own interpretation of what is much or little is excluded. 


HEALTH 75 


Secondly, questions must be objective and not sugges- 
tive: the voice of the examiner and the general attitude 
that he has toward the child will affect the child’s an- 
swers. If a child suspects that he is to answer in a certain 
way, he will, naturally, answer that way. For instance, if 
a physician asks: ‘Don’t you eat vegetables ?” Very nat- 
urally the child will say, “Yes.” But if you ask the child 
to write down, without helping him, “What did you eat 
for your last three suppers?” you are more likely to get 
accurate answers. ‘That, of course, is a very important 
point, and questionnaires are of no value unless the psy- 
chology in the asking on the part of the examiner has been 
eliminated as much as possible. 

We were enabled to determine the following facts 
from these questionnaires: Chronic fatigue or, if I may 
use a more practical, less ambiguous term, chronic sub- 
efficiency is manifested in four ways: (1) by what we call 
feelings of fatigue, that is, the complaints of the child of 
headaches, backaches, pain in the legs, soreness in the 
muscles, a feeling of burning in the muscles, and so forth; 
(2) by a decrease in the individual’s average mental work 
ing capacity as attested to by the work he does in school 
as revealed in his report card and by the questionnaire an- 
swered by the room teacher; (3) a decrease in the physi- 
cal strength and endurance of the child, as attested to by 
his own questionnaire and the teachers’ and parents’ ob- 
servations of the child during physical activity; and (4) 
by the emotional reactions of the child. 

Only those children were considered chronically sub- 
efficient if at least two of these four factors had been 
present for at least three months, In this group are, there- 
fore, not included children who suffer from what we call 


76 INTELLIGENT PARENTHOOD 


fatiguability, which is a symptom of many organic dis- 
eases, such as heart disease, tuberculosis, or diseased ton- 
sils. Nor do we have in mind acute fatigue which may be 
produced artificially by having a child do a definite and. 
exhaustive amount of work; nor do we speak of that fa- 
tigue which follows in the trail of a contagious disease in 
children who go back to school before they have thor- 
oughly recovered. 

When we speak of chronic subefficiency we have in 
mind a condition which is psychic and physiologic, a con- 
dition in which the signs and symptoms may be predomi- 
nantly psychological or emotional, or predominantly 
physical, but in which always more than one organ and 
more than one system is involved. It comes on slowly and 
is insidious. There are cases in which this condition may 
be congenital. I mean by that that some children whom 
we will call asthenic—meaning “without strength’—are 
born with an inferior make-up which predestines them to 
chronic subefliciency for the rest of their lives. That is the 
condition I have in mind when I speak of chronic subefii- 
ciency, or chronic fatigue. 

The causes of chronic fatigue as I shall present them 
this afternoon are chiefly non-medical. I purposely avoid 
speaking of the medical side of fatigue, because it is not 
within the realm of parents and teachers, but rather 
within that of the medical profession. I am concerned this 
afternoon with the non-medical side of fatigue, which has 
to do with the social, economic, and emotional background 
of the child, which parents, teachers, and social workers 
can and should understand. 

I might say in brief, that among the non-medical 
causes five are most important. This does not mean every 


HEALTH 77 


one of these five causes must obtain simultaneously. In 
fact, it is rare to find just one cause responsible for a 
child’s chronic subefficiency. Usually, we have a combina- 
tion of two or three or more. Chief among the causes 
ranks inadequate sleep, though it is not a cause per se, 
being usually the result of one or more of the other causes. 

The second cause is inadequate diet, the third outside 
work for pay, the fourth excessive social activities, and 
the fifth inadequate conditions under which the child 
works in school. I mean by that improper lighting, im- 
proper ventilation, and all other factors which make up 
the hygiene of instruction. Those, I think, are the five 
most important causes. There are, of course, others, 
which time does not permit us to discuss. 

If you know the causes, half of your problem is 
solved. If you do away with the causes, you will likely 
effect a cure. Moreover, you will prevent the occurrence 
of chronic fatigue. The treatment of fatigue, of course, 
must be left to the physician, but the prevention is within 
the scope of the parents and the teachers. 

There is no measure in my mind that is more im- 
portant for the prevention of fatigue than the establish- 
ment of an adequate health schedule. It is, of course, im- 
possible to standardize health habits so that they might 
apply to all children. But I believe that a schedule which 
attempts to prescribe in definite doses sleep, food, physi- 
cal and mental activity as well as the amount of play, will 
do a great deal toward the conservation of the health of 
our school children. 

The schedule of rational habits of living, presented in 
this chart, has been constructed after a study of normal 
and fatigued children over periods varying from three 


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NUUATIHO IOOHOS UOd SLIAGVH TVNOLLVY JO ATOGAHOS ATIVG 


HEALTH 79 


months to two years. It has been devised for children at- 
tending public school in Minneapolis. For use in other 
cities and, perhaps, more so in rural districts, slight varia- 
tions may be necessary. 

It is, of course, impossible to standardize every habit 
of all the school children, but a schedule of rational hab- 
its emphasizing specifically the more important points of 
personal hygiene may help to prevent fatigue in the ma- 
jority of children. The chart is such an attempt. Most 
children in the first grade are between six and seven years 
of age, and the average age of the eighth-grade child is 
fourteen. Children who at fifteen years of age are still in 
public school must be grouped in the eighth grade. Seven 
o'clock has been decided upon for the time of rising. 
There is no need for any child to arise earlier, since no 
child should be allowed any physical or mental work be- 
fore school. An adequate breakfast should be served with 
regularity from 7:45 to 8:05. Every child should remain 
at the table for twenty minutes. Too many children are 
allowed to go to school with empty stomachs, having 
drank but a cup of coffee and eaten but a slice of bread. 
Such children invariably show fatigue in the early hours 
of the forenoon. 

With a rising time at 7:00 and school beginning at 
8:45 there remain forty minutes before the morning ses- 
sion begins. It was with a purpose that we included this 
figure in our schedule. So many mothers are apt to say: 
“Why, there isn’t any time in the morning. We have to 
rush our children to get to school on time.’’ Would they 
actually figure out the time they would hardly hold that 
attitude. In the forty minutes between breakfast and 
school time there should be no need of rushing and no or- 


80 INTELLIGENT PARENTHOOD 


ganized work or play should be assigned, so that the child 
shall be in a state of relaxation rather than of tension. 
School begins at 8:45 in all grades of the Minneapolis 
public schools and ends at 11:30 in the first grade, at 
11:45 from the second to the fourth grade, and at 12:00 
noon from the fifth grade up. Thirty minutes are allowed 
between the time school lets out and luncheon. A hot 
luncheon served at home or at school must be insisted 
upon. Cold sandwiches and coffee must be avoided, Every 
child should have fifteen minutes of complete rest be- 
tween luncheon and the afternoon session. This rest will 
help to neutralize the morning’s fatigue. School ends at 
3:00 p.m. in the first grade and at 3:15 in the following 
grades. Supper should be served from 6:00 to 6:30 for 
children under ten years of age and from 6:30 to 7:00 for 
the older children. 

Our social life is becoming more and more complex, 
our children are imitating the habits of their parents. 
Their daily activities have increased, the hours of sleep 
decreased. Our children must have more sleep if they are 
to be conserved. Twelve hours of sleep is the minimum 
need at six and seven years of age, eleven and a half hours 
at eight, eleven hours at nine and ten years, ten and a half 
hours at eleven, ten hours at twelve, and nine and a half 
at thirteen years and up. It is especially important to ad- 
here to this minimum amount of nine and a half hours 
during puberty because of the special demands made on 
the organism by growth. The bedtime schedule is so ar- 
ranged as to allow fifteen to thirty minutes for the child 
to fall asleep. I have computed the free time that the chil- 
dren have at their disposal after school until bedtime, and 
have devised a schedule, by which this free time is divided 


HEALTH 81 


into time for play and time for work, mental as well as 
physical. Children six and seven years old have one hun- 
dred and eighty minutes of free time. ‘This time should 
be entirely spent in free and unrestricted play and games, 
since the sudden precipitation into a sedentary and mental 
life makes them especially susceptible to fatigue. 

It is not only unnecessary but it is dangerous for a 
child of this age to study music and do home work. Prin- 
cipals, school teachers, and musicians, who are genuinely 
interested in the welfare of the child, believe that home 
study and music lessons should be delayed until the age 
of ten years. At the age of nine, when the great increase of 
growth is on the decline, especially that of the brain, the 
children may begin to have some responsible work, pref- 
erably physical, Twenty-five minutes of chores for either 
boy or girl is sufficient. Two hundred minutes or 80 per 
cent of the total free time should be devoted to play. At 
the age of ten, 18 per cent of the free time or forty min- 
utes daily is devoted to work, and 82 per cent for play. Of 
the forty minutes, twenty-five is given for physical duty 
and fifteen minutes to mental work. This fifteen minutes 
can be used for music or home studies if necessary. At 
eleven years, 72 per cent of the free time or one hundred 
eighty-five minutes is allotted for play and 28 per cent or 
seventy minutes for work. Of the seventy minutes, forty- 
five minutes should be reserved for physical and twenty- 
five minutes for mental work. At and after twelve years, 
there is a steady increase of mental and physical work. 
Of the two hundred eighty-five minutes of free time, 66 
per cent or one hundred eighty minutes are for play and 
34 per cent for work. At this age, one hundred five min- 
utes are allowed for work, sixty minutes for physical and 


82 INTELLIGENT PARENTHOOD 


forty-five minutes for mental. At thirteen years, 60 per 
cent of the time is for play and 40 per cent for work. This 
allows one hour for physical and one hour for mental 
work and the remaining three hours for miscellaneous 
activities. At fourteen and fifteen years, the work time is 
increased 9 per cent, giving one hundred sixty-five min- 
utes or 57 per cent for play and 43 per cent for work, fif- 
teen minutes more for mental work than for physical. 

Now may I again repeat some of the fundamental 
points that I think of practical interest to our parents, to 
every teacher, every social worker, and possibly also 
physicians. First of all, chronic fatigue or chronic subefli- 
ciency is not a symptom, it is a disorder. It is recognized 
in four ways: first, by the complaints of the child, the so- 
called feelings of fatigue; second, by the decrease in the 
individual’s average capacity for work in school; third, 
by a decrease in the physical strength and endurance of 
the child; and fourth, by signs of emotional unbalance. 

Then the second important point to remember is the 
non-medical causes: inadequate sleep, inadequate diet, 
homework for pay, excessive social activities, and physi- 
cal factors which interfere with adequate hygiene of in- 
struction; and, finally, the most important thing in my 
mind in the prevention of fatigue is the understanding and 
establishment of an adequate schedule of health habits. 

We do not pay enough attention to health habits, be- 
cause it is so simple to understand, and because it is taken 
for granted. If these health habits were expensive to ap- 
ply, if they were labeled with a Latin formula, if they 
were rather difficult to understand, we might be more apt 
to pay attention to them, but it is because they are so 
simple that we neglect them. 


THE IMPORTANCE OF THE 
EARLY YEARS 


rare.) My 
OU Aatr aN 
as | 





INTRODUCTION 


Edna N. White, Director, Merrill-Palmer School, 
Detroit, Michigan 

The outstanding importance of the preschool years in 
the life of the child would seem to be no longer questioned 
—it might almost claim to be the fad of the hour. 

From the physical standpoint, the handicaps pre- 
sented by the children who are entering school certainly 
offer convincing evidence of the necessity of supervision 
and attention to health during the preschool period. On 
the mental side a well-known psychologist has said “that 
in one sense the amount of mental growth which takes 
place in the first sexennium of life far exceeds anything 
which the child achieves in any subsequent period.” This 
is the period where the child’s subsequent attitudes toward 
authority, affection, and reality are determined. 

Probably the importance of the development of social 
attitudes even exceeds those of the physical and mental. 
It has been assumed that little children are individualistic 
and not responsive to social contacts. Experience with 
groups of preschool children does not confirm this theory ; 
on the contrary, they seem both to enjoy and profit by 
association with each other fully as much as older chil- 
dren. 

The educational problems of these years are varied: 
the development of vocabulary; motor controls; apprecia- 
tions of color, rhythm, tone, habit formation and attitudes 
toward life and its problems belong to these early years. 
Understanding of abilities and methods of training are 


85 


86 INTELLIGENT PARENTHOOD 


yet to be formulated for teachers and parents who are in- 
terested in the all-round development of the child. Before 
this can be done specialists in the various fields must study 
preschool children individually and in groups and inter- 
pret their needs in terms of modern science. | 

One of the new agencies developed for this purpose is 
the nursery school as it has been organized in a few cen- 
ters in America. These centers co-operate with the par- 
ents in determining and interpreting the needs of the chil- 
dren they enrol, and serve as laboratories for parental 
education. The information gathered by these groups 
should form the basis for a real understanding of the 
problems of preschool education. In this purpose they 
differ entirely from the nursery schools of English type 
which were organized to meet a social need. 


THE NURSERY SCHOOL AND THE PRESENT 
| SOCIAL ORDER 


Patty Smith Hill, Professor of Education, Teachers College, 
Columbia University 


Education moves from above downward. Hitherto 
the youngest members of society, the weakest and most 
helpless have been ignored until the needs of the colleges, 
the high schools, and the elementary schools were well 
established. Today mothers are asking that their young 
children’s rights to a just proportion of the school tax be 
recognized, as their older children’s have for centuries. 
Kindergartens, Montessori Houses of Childhood, and 
nursery schools have been organized as a response to these 
demands. 

What are the influences which have worked together 
to bring about the beginnings of preschool education? 
Among the most important have been war and industry, 
with their disintegrating effect upon the home. The 
crowding of families into tenements and slums, the going 
out of the mother into industry, the bringing of work into 
the home where the children too were pressed into service 
—all these changes have played their part in the develop- 
ment of nurseries and nursery schools. 

Furthermore, psychoanalysis, leading later on to 
mental and social hygiene and psychiatry, has called at- 
tention to the importance of conditions surrounding the 
child before the sixth year because of their influence upon 
his later life. The health movement, too, which was 
started during the war and brought about the introduction 


87 


88 INTELLIGENT PARENTHOOD 


of medical inspection into the schools, traced the causes of 
physical troubles back to an earlier and earlier age until 
they were found to have developed a good start before the 
child entered school. These discoveries have led naturally 
to new attention to the training of the young child at the 
preschool age. 

In the important years before formal school work be- 
gins, we who have been closely associated with the nurs- 
ery-school movement believe that it offers certain definite 
advantages over the average home. To begin with, it is an 
institution planned specifically for the child and his de- 
mands at this period. In the home the rights of all the 
other members of the family rightly must be considered. 
The nursery school has to meet only the needs of the 
young child. Moreover, what family can have its baby in- 
spected daily to keep it well instead of curing it after it 
is ill? The nursery school offers, as no home, even the 
home of wealth, is likely to offer, the daily care of doctors, 
nurses, psychologists, psychiatrists, and nutrition spe- 
cialists. 

The mother has to be trained to meet the needs of 
children of all ages. The nursery school, on the other 
hand, can have a teacher trained especially for the care of 
the preschool child—a specialist in the education of the 
two-, three-, and four-year-old. 

Equipment is another advantage that the nursery 
school has over the home. Because the homes of the well- 
to-do have mahogany tables, lovely china, and fine rugs, 
the period of two to four, before the mother knows it, be- 
comes a “No, no” period. The nursery school plans equip- 
ment that says to a child “Yes, yes.” It provides sur- 


IMPORTANCE OF EARLY YEARS 89 


roundings which cannot harm the child and which the 
child, in turn, cannot injure. 

Many of us who have been associated with the nurs- 
ery-school movement for years are convinced that to be 
continually in the presence of anyone under any condi- 
tions twenty-four hours in the day, week in and week out, 
month in and month out, year in and year out, is rather 
trying. It sets the family pattern too exclusively. Either 
friction occurs when people are together too much; or the 
relationship between the mother and the child, and the 
family and the child, may become intensified and the child 
and the mother grow too dependent upon each other. 
When this happens I do not know whom to feel sorrier for, 
the mother or the child. The nursery school gives them 
both a rest from each other’s companionship for a few 
hours in the day. 

Again, few homes can hope to offer little children the 
regularity which is easily attained in the nursery school. 
With the very best intentions in the world there are in 
the home continual interruptions in the schedule of food, 
sleep, open air, play, and the other elements in the life of 
the young child. Anyone who has had the care of young 
children knows that regularity at this period means both 
morality and health. You have a very well-behaved baby 
as long as things are regular, and you have a very dis- 
turbed and difficult problem in behavior when this regu- 
larity is altered. 

I am convinced of the fact that what we call person- 
ality is due largely to having many varieties of natural 
modes of expression in early life. Some of us grow up in- 
articulate because the opportunities for expression in 
childhood were headed off. The nursery school provides 


90 INTELLIGENT PARENTHOOD 


normal channels of expression for the baby. He learns to 
“say it with” words, with gestures, with investigation, 
with dramatization, with art, with rhythm. He learns to 
express himself to his playmates. In the nursery school 
questions on sex matters are met squarely, and the child 
is so prepared that many of the problems of adolescence 
will take care of themselves. No element is more impor- 
tant to the child’s mental health than this frank facing of 
sex questions. 

Finally, the baby at two years gets an examination in 
nursery school which is usually denied to children until 
they get into the criminal courts. One Juvenile Court 
worker who was on our program when we first attempted 
to organize the nursery schools in New York last June 
said that this was the first form of education he had ever 
come in contact with which he felt was actually “on time !”’ 
I see no reason in the world why we should give our chil- 
dren no thorough examination as to character, personal- 
ity, and social background until we find them in our crim- 
inal courts. The nursery school moves that examination 
up to the second year so that it will be not only on time 
but ahead of time. 

Yet, important as are the benefits of the nursery 
school for the child, it does not exist for the child alone. 
It has grown up in a changing world that needed a new, 
flexible institution to help solve the family problem, to 
help meet the needs of the mother, the father, and the 
older children as well as the baby. A great change is tak- 
ing place in the home, and there is widespread alarm, 
some of it justified, I believe, and some of it unnecessary. 
Why, if every other institution is changing, must we at- 
tempt to keep the home exactly as it was in our grand- 


IMPORTANCE OF EARLY YEARS 91 


mother’s day? We cannot do it if we would! We might as 
well face that fact. Nevertheless, I believe there is more 
resistance to change in the home than in any other insti- 
tution, including the church, with its conflict between 
fundamentalism and modernism. 

The father who prides himself on improvements in 
finance and industry and transportation is overwhelmed 
when he sees the kitchenette taking the place of the 
kitchen, when he sees the wife no longer lending her 
powers to the production of those ideal pies that mother 
used to make, even though he may get just as good, and 
better in Mary Elizabeth’s tearoom, just around the cor- 
ner. We must give him credit, however, for the fact that 
all his alarm is not over the pies; what he is greatly wor- 
ried about is the change from his mother’s type. It can- 
not be denied that the status of the woman, the wife, the 
mother, the homemaker is changed, and neither the home 
nor society is so organized that it can at present adjust 
itself to this change. Society has adapted itself to the 
right of the father to go on with his profession, but when 
the mother goes out, the young generation stands in dan- 
ger of being neglected. 

We cannot turn the wheels back, so we must face the 
change in the home with courage. We must see to it that we 
build a family life that will survive any outward changes 
in its setting, a family life that will endure even though 
the altar of the home may have to be set up in a two-room 
apartment with a kitchenette or in the much despised hotel 
with opportunities for service of meals. Whatever hap- 
pens, it requires genius and a new consecration to the de- 
termination that home and family life on a higher order 
must be preserved and evolve. 


92 INTELLIGENT PARENTHOOD 


There is no unit in social life that can compete with 
the home, I believe, in the control of human destiny. This 
is most of all possible in early childhood. The home 
should be the peaceful haven to which all the members of 
the family return. It is pre-eminently the shelter offered 
by society to tender, growing personalities, not yet strong 
enough to stand the hardships and the buffeting of the 
wide, wide world. But unless all the personalities in the 
home have an equal chance for development and service 
inside the home as well as out, I do not see how we can 
hope that mental, moral, and physical health will be the 
outgrowth of the home of the future. 

In order to have an ideal family life, I do not believe 
that certain members of the family have to sacrifice their 
rights to growth, to development, and to service outside. 
This fall we made case studies of families where one 
member was left behind, was sacrificed for the good of 
the whole, and it made very interesting reading matter. 
I firmly believe not only that the one who is left behind 
does not grow, but that those who go forward do not grow 
as they should if they leave behind any member of the 
family. Most of the tragedies that take place in family 
life are due to the fact that the older generation, espe- 
cially the mother, is often left behind with her standards 
and her ideals while the younger generation goes forward 
with new standards and new ideals. That means that they 
cannot come together. The gap in the family! Those who 
go forward are sacrificed as well as the one who is left 
behind. 

Many good managers of home and family life are 
finding, after their children reach the school age, a way 
for social service outside the home, and even for some 


IMPORTANCE OF EARLY YEARS 93 


economic independence. There begins to be alarm when 
you talk about outside interests and economic independ- 
ence for mothers. I do not see why, if soviety were organ- 
ized differently, there should not be an arrangement 
whereby, when children are old enough to go to school— 
even a nursery school—certain hours of the day should 
not belong to the mother of the family for recreation, de- 
velopment, study, growth, for social and civic service, 
and, if need be, for some economic independence. I have 
had to learn that by hard knocks. I didn’t believe it for 
years, but now I have come to think that the people who 
have been urging this adjustment have something valua- 
ble to contribute to us. 

Let us consider, then, what types of mothers need 
the help of the nursery school. Unquestionably, the 
mother who goes out of the home to work needs help in 
caring for her children. The difficulty here is that she 
needs it from seven in the morning until seven at night, 
which is a longer period than the nursery school can main- 
tain a high educational level without great expense. No 
nursery-school teacher can possibly keep her health and 
strength and a high level of teaching and care of chil- 
dren who tries to spread her energy over that number of 
hours. We have tried it; we have co-operated with sey- 
eral day nurseries in New York City and we reached the 
point where we had to insist upon our nursery-school 
teachers being weighed every week just as we had the 
children weighed, to be sure we were not robbing Peter to 
pay Paul. 

The mother who stays at home and brings in work 
and the mother who goes out for part-day service also 
needs help. A number of years ago when I was first inter- 


94 INTELLIGENT PARENTHOOD 


ested in the opening of our nursery schools, I looked into 
the proportion of women of the laboring class who were 
out of the home for two, three, and four hours a day. I 
was quite surprised to see how industry was adapting 
itself to this part-time work. Frequently on Broadway 
near where I live a sign would be hanging out which read 
like this “Wanted, a clerk for two hours.” In one of our 
very large restaurants I found that many of the wait- 
resses were mothers, serving for two or three hours, get- 
ting economic independence. If I had the time I would 
like to tell you how a little, ignorant Irish woman opened 
my eyes to what this economic independence means in 
some families. She told me of the difference in her home 
life—in the attitude of her husband toward her, in her 
own feeling of independence, and what she had to offer to 
her children—when she didn’t have to beg for her street- 
car fare from her husband. 

On the other hand, the mother who stays at home all 
day needs and needs badly the kind of help that the nurs- 
ery school can offer her. If we only knew something about 
the problem of the woman who is on the job twenty-four 
hours out of the twenty-four, I think we would have more 
sympathy with her. Again and again this tragedy hap- 
pens in New York: a young mother who has not yet had 
youth killed in her wants to get away for a little while. 
She locks the door of the apartment, leaves her children 
there, and goes to the movies. There is a tenement fire 
and the next morning our newspapers have a great deal 
to say about the selfishness of the mother. I think she 
needs sympathy as well as condemnation. 

In one city we found large numbers of mothers living 
within four blocks of the river who had never seen it! 


a 


IMPORTANCE OF EARLY YEARS 95 


One of the things we did was to get the street-car com- 
panies of that city to give us checks, two for five cents in- 
stead of five cents each, to get these methers to go with 
their families to the parks. Women like these are tied in 
because they think they cannot get out. They belong to 
an organization which has been described thus: “This or- 
ganization has no association, affiliation or connection in 
any way, shape, form or manner with any political league 
of voters; membership more than 4,205,000; a branch in 
every state; a chapter in every congressional district; it 
is called the association of overworked and underpaid 
dishwashing housewives; headquarters by the cook stove, 
with the cradle near at hand and the washtub not far off.” 
That type of mother, I think, needs a great deal of help. 

Then, too, there is a large number of highly intelli- 
gent women, many of whom have had a college education, 
whose husband’s salaries do not justify a nurse, or in 
some instances even a cook. These mothers of the profes- 
sional class, which is notably underpaid, have great need 
of part-day care for their children. For these reasons it 
seems to me that the nursery school must be a very flexible 
institution, adapting itself to the type of mother it serves. 
Here it might be possible to get a group of highly intelli- 
gent mothers to carry out an afternoon program such as 
we would give the children, had we the whole-day care of 
them, and thus this type of woman could get the service 
she needs. 

Then there is the woman who is very able, efficient, 
and capable, and who is either unwilling to marry or if 
married is unwilling to have children because she cannot 
see her way clear, unless she gives up her professional 
career, to provide for those children what she had when 


96 INTELLIGENT PARENTHOOD 


she was growing up. Yet this is the very woman from 
whom we should expect the best in the way of stock for 
the next generation. We are hard on her and I used to be, 
but I am not now. I believe that if society would manage 
some way to provide for this high-grade woman part-day 
care for her child, more of her type would marry and 
bring children into the world. The world needs her chil- 
dren badly and I see no better way to provide for the 
future than to give her through the nursery school the 
service she needs. 

The last mother I have reference to is the one whom I 
personally am most likely to be hard upon. This is the 
one who stays at home, lives in luxury, and has all the 
maids she wants. In the old days her children were cared 
for by the unemployed women who hung around every 
household. Do you realize that a generation ago a married 
sister had at least one spinster sister who held herself in 
readiness to live for the sister’s family? Or else there was 
a grandmother who could take the child for a little while. 
We often wonder what has become of the grandmothers 
today. All of us in my generation can look back to moth- 
ers and grandmothers who at forty put on the little bon- 
net and tied the little bow very tightly and primly under 
their chins and were supposed to take their place by the 
chimney side. But now that the grandmothers and maiden 
aunts are disappearing, the mother of this type farms out 
her babies to nurses who have had no training whatever, 
nurses who have in many instances uniforms that look 
very much better on the outside than the type of mind they 
dress. This mother is perfectly satisfied to be econom- 
ically a consumer and not a producer. If she produces 
children she turns them over to others and asks few ques- 


IMPORTANCE OF EARLY YEARS 97 


tions. Has she talents? I sometimes wonder. If she has, 
she shows no evidence of wanting them trained. 

I wish we would turn on this latter type of mother 
the contempt that we tend to turn upon the woman who 
longs to have her abilities trained and used outside as well 
as inside of the home. To her I would be glad to say, “If 
you will develop your talent for your family and yourself 
I will be one of those to open an institution and take care 
of your baby for a few hours a day in order to let you go 
out into the world and play your part.” 

The nursery school, then, has come into being be- 
cause of a changing society. Shortage in houses, limited 
space, people crowding into smaller and smaller apart- 
ments, our inability to secure domestic help, the lack of 
maiden sisters, aunts, and other unemployed female rela- 
tives to help us are all factors in this change. The nursery 
school is a flexible institution planned to meet the need of 
the new home and family life, which must be organized on 
the highest level that it has ever reached in our history. 


THE MOTIVATION OF THE YOUNG CHILD 


John E. Anderson, Director, Institute of Child Welfare, 
University of Minnesota 


The problem of the motivation of the young child is 
the problem of the origin of the energy of the young child, 
and the effective direction of that energy. When we con- 
sider the source of children’s energy, we see at once that 
the child is active because he is a living being and that ac- 
tivity is in a sense synonymous with life. The display of 
energy is an indication of living. Many parents do not 
realize this fact and expect the preschool child to be a 
piece of furniture, looking upon an inactive, “goody- 
goody” type of child as the normal, healthy child. The 
active and energetic child is much nearer being the nor- 
mal, healthy child than is the quiet, placid, and good child 
who is so much easier to control. 

The second point that we note in connection with the 
activity of the child is that it is not simply the result of 
unconfined energy, but that it is energy which is mani- 
fested in certain ways. We have been told many times 
that the parent or teacher is in the position of a sculptor 
molding a sort of plastic medium. But this is not the case. 
The child is not plastic, is not a medium which is to be 
molded this way or that completely at the will of the indi- 
vidual who is controlling the child. A better simile is made 
when we compare the child with a complicated and in- 
volved piece of machinery, by all odds much more com- 
plicated and involved than any piece of machinery that 
we know, and when we compare the parent and teacher 


98 


IMPORTANCE OF EARLY YEARS 99 


with an engineer guiding a machine which by virtue of its 
own structure has certain definite limitations. 

With this in mind, we see at once that the energy 
which lies back of the activity of the child is expended in 
accordance with its organization, that is, the manner in 
which the child is constructed. In other words, the child, 
like a bit of machinery, operates in certain ways rather 
than in an utterly hit-or-miss fashion. At the moment or- 
ganization begins, the possibilities of the expenditure of 
energy are limited by that very organization. The limita- 
tions imposed by the very nature of the child arise partly 
out of its anatomical structure, and partly out of its nery- 
ous system—that complex conduction device which con- 
nects receiving organ with muscle and gland. To use sev- 
eral crude but striking instances, we may point out the 
fact that neither the child nor the adult can scratch the 
middle of his back as readily as he can scratch his chest, 
because anatomically, he is not built that way. Neither can 
the adult nor the child react to X-rays as he can to light 
rays within the spectrum, because his nervous mechanism 
is not built that way. When the mouth region of the infant 
is stimulated by a nipple, the lips of the infant close about 
the nipple and suckling starts.. Under this stimulation, the 
infant does not run, or stand on its head, but goes through 
a very definite and specific response, because it is built in 
that way—all because of limitations laid down in its very 
nature on the expenditure of energy. 

We speak of these limitations on the expenditure of 
energy as inherited, and cover by that term a whole host 
of devices both structural and functional which lay out 
the limits within which the organism must function. If 
we are considering the behavior of the individual, we 


100 INTELLIGENT PARENTHOOD 


speak of reflexes, instincts, and emotions, or in more mod- 
ern terms of inherited pattern reactions, referring by 
this term to the fact that the energy of the child must, by 
its very nature, be expended in certain definite patterns. 
While it is not the purpose of this paper to discuss such 
reactions in detail, I wish to make it very clear that the 
parent undertaking the training of a child does not start 
with a plastic substance that can be molded this way or 
that way in accordance with the wishes and desires of the 
parent but rather with a very complex and involved or- 
ganization that functions in certain ways and which has 
both limitations and potentialities. The parent or teacher 
is rather in the position of an engineer whose engine prop- 
erly guided and controlled can expend its energy effec- 
tively ; or improperly and poorly guided and controlled, 
may do incalculable harm, tear itself to pieces and wreck 
and destroy much that is about, possibly the engineer 
himself. No one undertakes, save at very great risk, to 
operate an engine without some preliminary study of its 
possibilities and its limitations. Effective guidance and 
direction does not come full-fledged into being, but rather 
springs from that careful and thorough study for which 
the groups arranging this conference stand. 

Carrying our simile still farther, we come clearly to 
see that the child is a self-propelling type of machine, the 
energy and activity of which originate in its internal 
structure. Literally then, whatever we may do to the 
child, we do not put into the child force, energy, nor activ- 
ity, that is, we do not impell it, but rather bring out from 
it that which is already in it by virtue of its very nature. 
Our relation to the child is in no sense that of the sculp- 
tor to his clay, nor that of an owner to his personal prop- 


IMPORTANCE OF EARLY YEARS 101 


erty, but rather that of an engineer handling a strong yet 
delicate engine, or that of a trustee handling a property 
for its own best development. We are engineers rather 
than sculptors, trustees rather than owners. 

The problem of the motivation of the young child is 
hence inextricably bound up with the guidance and direc- 
tion of the child’s activities rather than with doing as we 
will with a completely receptive and plastic medium. The 
very title of this paper conveys a wrong impression in so 
far as it suggests that we motivate the child—the child, in 
truth, furnishes his own motivation. We take advantage 
of the potentiality within him and either guide and direct 
him into successful and useful activity, or divert and pros- 
titute that which is within him. 

Further, as we consider this problem of motivating 
the child, we see that the child with its already built-up 
organization is put in contact with an exceedingly compli- 
cated and involved environment, that we are taking an or- 
ganism which has been evolved through some hundreds of 
thousands of years and fitting it to a social structure 
which at best is a few thousand years old, and so far as 
many of its details are concerned is less than one hundred 
years old. 

What is the nature of this thing we call environment? 
What does it do to this complex and involved bundle of 
possibilities ? We know that the behavior of the child is an 
expression of the relationship between its innate consti- 
tution and the environment with which it is surrounded. 
This environment consists of our language, our physical 
possessions, our appliances, our homes, our customs, our 
traditions, our institutions. Everything with which the 
child is surrounded from birth to maturity is affected or 


102 INTELLIGENT PARENTHOOD 


modified in some way by that which we call our social 
heritage, many elements of which are artifacts and run 
counter to the innate organization of the human. 

From this platform, you have already had consider- 
able emphasis placed upon the social environment of the 
child. In order to bring out clearly the complexity of the 
adjustment we expect even our preschool children to 
make, I suggest that you would find it a very interesting 
and informative procedure sometime to sit down in your 
home and write down a list of all objects and devices in 
your immediate environment from which you ask reac- 
tions on the part of the young child, comparing those 
physical objects with the similar environment of twenty- 
five or fifty years ago. You will be astounded at the spe- 
cific bits of apparatus, of furniture, of devices of one sort 
and another to which the young child must be brought to 
react. If you wish to go further and describe the persons 
and social situations to which you also expect reactions, 
your list will be long and involved indeed. 

Consider also for a moment an important shift in the 
environment of the young child that has taken place with- 
in recent years. It is not so long ago that the great ma- 
jority of young children passed through the preschool 
period on farms or in small urban communities with plenty 
of things about the home—tools, boards, pieces of metal, 
bowlders, animals, etc., to which there was easy access— 
whereas now the majority of our preschool children grow 
up in tenements, duplexes, or apartments with relatively 
small area, few objects easy of access, and restrictions 
galore. 

From whichever point of view we approach it, we see 
how involved is the problem of motivation. It becomes 


IMPORTANCE OF EARLY YEARS 103 


more involved when we realize that whatever the environ- 
ment, the child will make some sort of adjustment. Our 
problem of motivating the child then goes back to a some- 
what deeper problem as we seek an answer to the question 
whither, i.e., for what type of life, we are motivating the 
child. 

We must, as parents, decide to some extent what kind 
of a child we want by deciding what kind of an adult we 
want. We must, if we are to surround our youngsters with 
the best possible situations, consider very carefully and 
definitely the relationship between childish situations and 
adult reactions. We must, somehow or other, get away 
from the idea of handling the child in its early period for 
our own convenience or in the easiest possible way, or 
with a minimum of trouble or with a minimum of disturb- 
ance to the household; and consider the relationship of 
the young child to the man or to the woman. It may very 
well be that a certain amount of rigorous treatment in the 
early period of a child’s life may mean a well-adjusted 
adult. It may well be that too great laxity in the handling 
of the very small child may bring with it serious difficulty 
in adult life. It may well be that the thing which is the 
easiest and most convenient for us, as parents, to do is 
from the standpoint of the whole life of the individual 
quite the worst thing that might have been done. Our 
problem is to consider not so much the isolated bits of 
behavior we see from day to day as to consider the whole 
course of the child’s life; and to as great a degree as pos- 
sible orient and organize the child’s situation about that 
life course. What kind of an adult do you want? Do you 
wish an adult who is frank and straightforward? Do you 
wish an adult who speaks excellent English? Do you wish 


104 INTELLIGENT PARENTHOOD 


an adult who is calm, poised, and emotionally well bal- 
anced? Do you wish an adult who is versatile and can 
meet a variety of situations? Do you want an adult who 
can go through life with never-failing courage and faith? 

Note that in the preceding discussion I am not seek- 
ing an imposition of adult ideals or modes of behavior 
upon the child but rather trying to emphasize that effec- 
tive motivation in childhood, including the period of very 
young childhood, involves not only a careful study of the 
child as he is, but also careful and thoughtful considera- 
tion of the child in the whole process of becoming an 
adult. The child coming in contact with an environment 
will make many responses, some of which must be se- 
lected, others which must be eliminated. Successful ad- 
justment at the adult level is not so much a matter of the 
responses which first appear, as it is a matter of the selec- 
tion from among responses first appearing. Character, 
sanity, personality are not accidents but are achievements 
attained through a struggle between conflicting modes of 
response which begin at the cradle. 

Can we formulate any general principles with refer- 
ence to the training of the young child which can be in- 
terpreted in the light of the preceding discussion of mo- 
tivation; in other words, can we discuss the kind of en- 
vironment with which the child should be surrounded? I 
have attempted to state a few such principles which seem 
to me important in setting up the proper motivation in the 
young child, looking toward a surrounding of the child 
with specific situations which may be effective in provid- 
ing desirable adult types of reaction. 

One of the very first principles is that in the young 
child’s life, we must provide a certain amount of regu- 


IMPORTANCE OF EARLY YEARS 105 


larity and constancy in the environment. If the environ- 
ment of the child is too shifting, is continuously changing, 
is either physically, intellectually, or emotionally too va- 
ried, there is no opportunity for him to build up consistent 
reactions to his environment. This principle of regularity 
and constancy of environment applies almost as soon as 
the child is born. Regular habits of eating and of sleeping 
in the infant and the young child constitute a frame work 
about which other desirable habits can be erected. We 
sometimes look upon regular habits of eating and of sleep- 
ing as purely health matters which extend only to the 
physical level, but they are far more than health matters 
in a narrow sense. Many of the most difficult problem 
children that you find in the preschool period are children 
who in infancy have not been held to an exact eating or 
sleeping schedule. 

What does the building up of the fairly constant ex- 
ternal situation do with reference to the individual? It 
enables the individual to build a reaction to a specific 
situation and thus to be free for meeting other situations 
in the environment. If his sleeping periods are irregular, 
the eating is irregular, he is definitely handicapped. dif 
the mother is angry at the child at one moment, and an 
instant later grasps the child to her bosom and cuddles it 
up, you have a shifting emotional reaction to which the 
child finds it very difficult to adjust. If you tell the child 
today that he must be a good boy and go to sleep, and to- 
morrow you tell the child that he must be a good boy and 
stay awake, you need not wonder that the child has diffi- 
culty in building up a correct reaction to the types of in- 
struction you are giving. 

Emotional stability on the part of the parent, con- 


106 INTELLIGENT PARENTHOOD 


sistency of reaction with reference to many of the situa- 
tions with which the child is surrounded, are much more 
important principles of training than is the severity or 
laxness of the discipline. I am sure that you will find 
cases where individuals outwardly are apparently very 
lax in handling their children, in which you will find run- 
ning through the laxness a consistency of handling cer- 
tain situations which enables the child to build funda- 
mental habits and which gives him in the ever changing 
situations with which he is surrounded the possibility of 
forming proper habits of adjustment. 

The second general principle of considerable im- 
portance is that the child should be given considerable 
freedom within limits. Too regular and too constant an 
environment is quite as bad as is too shifting and incon- 
stant an environment. We do not wish the child so far as 
his behavior is concerned to be unalterably tied to a fixed 
schedule. The opportunity for giving the child freedom in 
considerable amount arises particularly in connection with 
his play activity. One of the things which the world val- 
ues most highly is spontaneity, initiative, and zest in life, 
and one of the problems that we as adults face in handling 
our children is to take the interest, initiative, and zest of 
the young child and carry it over to reactions on an adult 
level. That cannot be done if we surround the child from 
its earliest period with too constrained and too rigorous 
and. too continuously dampening an environment. 

In this connection, I should like to bring out a point 
with reference to the learning process itself. A knowledge 
of the manner in which human beings learn when con- 
fronted with a new situation or a new problem is exceed- 
ingly helpful in producing a sympathetic understanding 


IMPORTANCE OF EARLY YEARS 107 


of the process through which the child is going. Although 
we do a great deal of Jip service to trial-and-error be- 
havior, we are too apt in our training to think of the final 
habit with its smooth-running, well-organized semi-auto- 
matic process without realizing that it has come out of 
random behavior with its many superfluous and unneces- 
sary movements. 

I have a feeling that, if in the early part of learning 
a child is surrounded by too many prohibitions and in- 
hibitions, the effect of the prohibitions and inhibitions is 
not to eliminate the undesirable features of the response, 
but to kill the motivation of the child for the whole series 
of responses which he is trying to undertake so that later 
on, after the individual has moved through this early pe- 
riod of adjustment, what we sometimes call negative in- 
struction can be given, because now the motivation of the 
individual with respect to the particular habit is well es- 
tablished and the negative instruction tends to eliminate 
undesirable features of the response. 

If, on setting out to learn to play golf, you were from 
the first too continuously reminded by your teacher or 
companion of your inefficiency, your bad shots, your poor 
performance, within a very short time, you would throw 
away your clubs and go home. If, instead, you were re- 
warded by favorable comments on your good shots with 
ignoring of your poor attempts, your motivation for the 
game would continue. Sometime later, after your interest 
was well developed, the negative instruction would come 
in quite naturally as a device for eliminating undesirable 
elements of your reaction. The relationship between neg- 
ative instruction and the stage of learning is well worth 
investigation. : 


108 INTELLIGENT PARENTHOOD 


A third and very important principle contemplates 
the provision in the environment of the young child of a 
complex and varied educative equipment. Here is an indi- 
vidual, interested and active, with many possibilities. If 
the environment is too simple, either because of limited 
equipment or because of too great readiness on the part 
of those with the child to do things for him, he is robbed 
of the opportunity of developing fundamental manipu- 
lative and intellectual skills. A child learns to lace shoes, 
not from shoes locked in a closet nor from shoes laced by 
his mother, but from actually attempting many times to 
lace shoes himself. 

An interesting case comes to my mind. This boy con- 
stituted a serious problem in that he was continuously 
running out in the road getting in the way of automobiles. 
His parents had spanked him, they cajoled him, they had 
begged him, they tried every possible device they could to 
meet the situation. On visiting the house, you saw a typi- 
cal, modern suburban home, with a beautiful little house 
set out on a perfectly smooth lawn, with nice hedges, and 
everything in apple-pie order. The child was turned out 
in the yard to grow up, without a single item of equip- 
ment, not a single device anywhere around which had any 
interest whatever. The only object in his environment 
which possessed any educative value or had any attraction 
was the road, and his response to the road was a perfectly 
natural and obvious reaction to the situation. 

A few boards, blocks, old bits of metal, some sand, 
some old cooking utensils, and much less of the house- 
keeper attitude about the place would have provided that 
small child with the opportunities for education demanded 
by the stage of his development and would have met the 


IMPORTANCE OF EARLY YEARS 109 


problem. Together with the restriction of play space to 
which the modern child is subjected, we have also tended 
to eliminate from his immediate environment many ob- 
jects and play opportunities which facilitate the develop- 
ment of motor and intellectual skills. 

An investigation now being made on the effect of our 
nursery school on the behavior of the child on Saturday 
and Sunday when not in school is of some significance. 
We thought that parents might find their children harder 
to control and more dissatisfied on Saturday and Sunday 
than was the case previous to the nursery school régime. 
Over and over again, the parents told us that the children 
were easier to control on Saturday and Sunday than for- 
merly, and that the child was happy and contented at 
being alone. More detailed inquiry revealed the fact that 
the children knew better how to play and how to utilize 
their playthings and objects about the house. In other 
_ words, the nursery school had provided a play content 
which we as parents are apt not to give the child. 

Here, too, I would stress a point which may not have 
occurred to you, the opportunity afforded by conversa- 
tion and discussion with the young child. Linguistic play 
is quite as important an educational agent as play in the 
ordinary sense. The presence of individuals who are will- 
ing to talk with the child furnishes one of the greatest 
educational opportunities. The theory that the child is to 
be parked during the preschool period and left just to 
grow is unsound, because such a procedure constitutes a 
mental starvation in a very real sense. 

The fourth principle, which is closely related to the 
preceding, concerns the desirability of providing social 
contacts for the young child, not only with adults, but 


110 INTELLIGENT PARENTHOOD 


with children of his own age. We have been amazed at the 
early age at which many of the attitudes which we ordi- 
narily look upon as characteristic of the older child and 
adult develop. Three- and four-year-olds, in groups, show 
sharply defined and distinct social attitudes. The setting- 
up of desirable attitudes before undesirable ones have be- 
come too strongly fixed is essential. In an atmosphere 
where give and take is a matter of course, where each in- 
dividual must co-operate with other individuals, funda- 
mental habits of meeting situations which may persist 
throughout the whole lifetime of the individual may be 
developed. Too often, undesirable and unsocial types of 
behavior are motivated in the only child—one can hardly 
be an only child all his life. 

As a fifth and final principle, I would emphasize the 
provision, in the environment of the child, of positive op- 
portunities for the development of character and moral 
qualities. Here we come to a problem in motivation on 
which we have astonishingly little information in the lit- 
erature. We have much about behavior problems; we ask 
ourselves many times what to do when this response goes 
wrong, what to do when the child does not eat spinach, 
what to do when the child sucks his thumb. We collect 
many case histories and make studies of problem children. 
Why should we not quite as assiduously collect cases and 
make studies of children with desirable behavior traits, 
using the clinical method. Instead of asking what is 
wrong, let us sometimes ask what is right. It is barely 
possible that we are becoming so problem-conscious that 
we are losing sight of the aim of child-training. I appeal 
to you as parents and as students of child behavior to 
seek out and study specific instances which show the effect 


IMPORTANCE OF EARLY YEARS 111 


of the introduction of positive rather than negative tech- 
niques, which show what to do quite as much as what not 
to do. 

I think here particularly of an incident which oc- 
curred the other day in a family with which I am familiar. 
The parents of the four small children quite early de- 
cided that they would bring up the children in an attitude 
in which bumps and pain were taken largely as a matter 
of course, and, whenever the children fell or bumped into 
things, passed off the bump as an incident rather than 
actually sympathizing with the children. It became quite 
a game in that household. These children, the other day, 
were to be inoculated with a preventive serum. They 
went into the waiting-room, did an ‘“‘eeny meeny miny mo” 
to see which one should go in first, with the result that 
the four-year-old child went in first. 

As he was being inoculated, the needle happened to 
break off in his arm, making it necessary to remove it, a 
somewhat painful process. He stood there with his teeth 
clenched, his fists tight, tears almost bursting out of his 
eyes, without uttering a sound. When he returned to the 
waiting-room, his older sister said, “Did it hurt?” The boy 
said, “Naw.” This was a four-year-old child. I have a 
feeling that through the atmosphere in which he has been 
brought up he has developed a positive series of reactions 
to pain-and-bump situations, which are the forerunners of 
those things which we call courage and faith and strength 
in the adult and which enable an individual to carry 
through in this thing that we call life. 


DETERMINISMS IN CHILDHOOD 


Dr. Ira S. Wile, Associate in Pediatrics, Mount Sinai H ospital, 
New York City 


I view man partially as an isolated animal, and par- 
tially as the result of his environment; not merely as a 
being that is physical in his relationships, but as one also 
spiritual in his relationships. Like other animals he has 
undergone many metamorphoses. Particularly does he 
change, I like to think, as the insects do, because they 
number among them the most social of the animals, such 
as the ants and the bees. By analogy at least, he may be 
regarded as undergoing transformations similar to those 
of some insects, as for example, butterflies and moths. 
This metamorphosis involves a change from the egg to 
that crawly thing that some people call a caterpillar, and 
others technically term a larva; then after shedding vari- 
ous skins in order to promote growth, and after going 
through sundry changes in development, the larva locks 
itself up for a period of time in a cocoon, and there be- 
comes transformed into a creature which is like neither 
the larva that went into it, nor the mature animal that 
emerges from it. The transitional stage is known as a 
pupa, out of which and within which is to develop the ma- 
ture insect—the imago. 

One cannot predict all the characteristics or qualities 
of the pupa by studying the isolated larva; nor can we be 
certain of the changes that we undergo as we develop 
through the caterpillar stage of existence, which is early 
childhood, molting from infancy into early childhood, and 


112 


IMPORTANCE OF EARLY YEARS 113 


into pre-adolescence, and then entering a sort of cocoon 
during adolescence to facilitate alterations of profound 
importance physically, mentally, and morally, prior to 
emerging as still developing adults. 

Evolution offers the idea that the individual and the 
race are the resultant product of a reaction between an 
organism and its physical environment. 

The strict hereditarian, with a most compulsive bio- 
logic thought even in the realm of psychology, probably 
would agree with Professor Woodworth in his statement 
concerning the fertilized ovum: “This microscopic, fea- 
tureless creature is already a human individual, with cer- 
tain of its feature traits—those that we call native—al- 
ready settled. It is a human being as distinguished from 
any other species, it is a white or colored individual, male 
or female, blonde or brunette, tall or short, stocky or slen- 
der, mentally gifted or deficient, perhaps a born musician, 
or adventurer, or leader of men.”’ The egg has consider- 
able responsibility. 

All eggs do not hatch as expected. Childhood may 
realize the potentialities of the egg, and it may not. Ma- 
turity may reflect the promise of the egg; on the other 
hand, the egg may turn out to be a spot, or even a rot. 

But childhood is a selected period of life, a period of 
growth and development that virtually has no beginning 
and has no well-defined end. Life is a continuity from 
conception through birth to death and from death to re- 
birth. Whether we start to study the preschool age, or 
whether we inquire into conditions at the time of birth, 
or whether we investigate early or late adolescence, we 
face the fact of a continuous development. As students 
we set up artificial points in time and in space from which 


114 INTELLIGENT PARENTHOOD 


we take surveys of life-situations, but childhood and ado- 
lescence are merely phases of a continuity of living. We 
note an age as beginning at adolescence because certain 
glands function somewhat more actively then than earlier 
in life, although probably no part of the body is wholly 
free from functioning at any time of its existence. 

Man is not perfect; he is not perfect as an animal, 
nor as a gregarious social being. Biology does not account 
for all of his imperfections. Few things in life are wholly 
biological; even the death-rate is not wholly biological. 
Rickets is not solely a problem of biology, it is also a ques- 
tion of sociology. Mental deficiency itself is a relative 
term. Binet was the first to recognize this fact when he 
remarked that a person might be normal in rural France 
and feeble-minded in Paris. So we have come to make 
various distinctions between a physical handicap and a 
social handicap. 

A person may be socially handicapped and evidence 
no physical handicap at all, and vice versa. Many phases 
of man’s personality and nature are due to causes that 
thus far are undiscoverable by our present methods of re- 
fined analysis, examination, and diagnosis. Hence, I am 
a little disturbed at times when I find that physical per- 
fection is being stressed to so great an extent, and that 
often there is inadequate attention given to the necessity 
for preparation for social living and to the social guid- 
ance that may be of greater service to the individual and 
to the group, of which he is a unit. 

Now my theme is determinisms. It sounds like a 
highly technical term. What are the things that determine 
the nature of childhood, its needs, and its personality? 

Determinism is a philosophical concept, indicating 


IMPORTANCE OF EARLY YEARS 115 


that all the events in the physical world fall into the prin- 
ciple of causation and effect. Life consists of absolutely 
dependent factors functioning in the relation of cause and 
effect. If this single cause is applied, this effect must nec- 
essarily follow. The cause being given, the event of neces- 
sity follows. Such constitutes a straight, rigid determin- 
ism. As a matter of fact, determinism is generally ac- 
cepted for a great many things in life, with the exception 
of the field of ethics and behavior which has a larger un- 
predictable element in it. 

Determinism is very simple when a unit stimulus is 
applied to a unit body and there results a unit response. 
That is a perfectly understandable example of cause and 
effect, but one is dealing with a single cause and a single 
effect. Rickets, however, is not the effect of one cause; it 
has many causes. To eliminate or cure all rickets some 
would say just have more and brighter sunshine, or keep 
the child in the fresh air, or give every child cod-liver oil, 
or increase home education in dietetics so that every in- 
fant will get the requisite amount of vitamins a, b, c. The 
application of one of these four principles would not 
eradicate rickets because no one of them involves its sole 
determiner. Although there is no proved single causal fac- 
tor in rickets one finds protagonists taking now this angle, 
_ now that, now another one, so that one can find ample tes- 
timony to the effect that this, that, or the other is the de- 
termining factor. 

If one attempts to explain why children are slow in 
walking or are delayed in speech, or why they run away 
from home, play truant, steal, or lie, one immediately en- 
ters a still more difficult field where causations are multi- 
ple and where single determinisms are not as natural nor 


116 INTELLIGENT PARENTHOOD 


as truly existent as one would believe from the claims of 
various persons propounding and defending certain de- 
terministic theories. 

Fortunately special investigations have occupied the 
thought of particular groups—but their conclusions need 
not be regarded as conclusive. 

There are the groups who believe in heredity and nur- 
ture. Nurture is a generic term. It need not mean much, 
and it may include everything except conception and its 
deterministic mechanisms. Personally, I am not sure just 
where heredity begins and environment ends. I can’t see 
that this line is artificially and rigidly drawn save for 
purposes of study and investigation. The environment of 
the now may be the heredity of the hereafter—I do not 
know. It is possible. At any rate, man has acquired a 
host of characteristics and potentials—whether by hered- 
ity or habit training, I do not know, although most scien- 
tists believe that acquired characteristics cannot be in- 
herited. 

On the other hand, there are numerous groups in the 
community that are stressing special determinisms. They 
are building up theories, each group giving emphasis as 
though its own theory were all conclusive. To illustrate, 
Davenport, one of our best geneticists, writes: ‘““Commit- 
ting crimes or misdemeanors is the reaction of the inher- 
ited plasm to external stimuli, just as the moth flies to the 
candle, the carrion fly to the source of the scent, so such 
persons perform their acts as part of necessary reactions.” 
(That is deterministic.) ‘Sincerity, insincerity, generos- 
ity or stinginess, truthfulness or untruthfulness are all 
qualities whose presence or absence is determined largely 
by the factor of heredity.” By way of contrast, Dr. Kil- 


IMPORTANCE OF EARLY YEARS 117 


patrick, who is viewing life from another angle states that 
social inheritance is more important than physical heredi- 
ty. So you can take your choice. 

This simply serves to indicate that there remains am- 
ple field for investigation and discovery. I have no quar- 
rel with any point of view, but we must be on guard 
against unproved theories and all so-called conclusive doc- 
trines. The more that is claimed for a definite system of 
any description, the more freely should it be challenged. 
There should not be the ready acceptance of doctrinaire 
ideas simply on authority. 

Dr. Baldwin has referred to the preschool experi- 
ments that he is supervising as a part of the important 
study of life and of a particular period of life. Child- 
hood’s greatest importance to us as social beings resides 
in the fact that childhood is the period of preparation for 
the development of adolescence, which leads out into the 
further developments of maturity. It is the age during 
which a child is learning his various worlds, meeting and 
absorbing reality, cultivating imagination and reasoning, 
becoming familiar with his own impulses, feelings, mo- 
tives, reactions, and is building up sentiments, attitudes, 
desires, and interests in terms of self-satisfaction and is 
endeavoring to reconcile them with parental demands, 
communal compulsions, customs, and mores. 

It is the development period for an expansion of the 
ego through its contraction. This sounds paradoxical, but 
it represents the idea of my “I” becoming smaller, so far 
as I as a person am concerned, and larger so far as my 
world is concerned. It typifies the socialization of an indi- 
vidual. During a long period of years the child is dipping 
constantly into the shallows and depths of the stream of 


118 INTELLIGENT PARENTHOOD 


world-consciousness. He is experimenting with life and 
trying to adjust his single, living personality with a uni- 
versal personality which some people term the apie of 
life, and others the evidence of God. 

Childhood is significant to the extent that it reveals 
some of the potentials that are said to be in the egg, but it 
affords us a time span during which we must provide a 
proper incubating environment for its growth and devel- 
opment, we must supply the material, the place, and the 
protection requisite to insure the various moltings and the 
formation of habits throughout the crawling, larval stage. 
It is our responsibility to afford right conditions for pre- 
serving energy, for enlarging and interpreting experience 
so as to provide the substance for the development in the 
pupal or adolescent stage. Society looks hopefully for 
the emergence of an efficient, useful, contented, rational, 
social being. The adult cannot rise above the levels in- 
herent in the egg, but his traits, tendencies, activities, and 
outlook are constantly subject to limitation and to changes 
prior to and even after maturity. It becomes all the more 
important, therefore, that we should exercise some criti- 
cal analysis in our interpretation of the facts and expe- 
riences of childhood. 

Emerson wisely remarked, “I am always environed 
by myself.” I create my own environment. I shall not go 
into the theory of noumenalism and phenomenalism, but 
my environment is partly a reflection of my contact with 
the world about me, my touch with it, my perception of 
it, my interpretation of it. I live in the world that I create 
for myself; in a world accepted, rejected or modified by 
me. The history of man has been bound up in ideas, and 
in changes of ideas. Each age believes itself the posses- 


IMPORTANCE OF EARLY YEARS 119 


sor of the best ideas and has strong convictions concerning 
the rationality of its own processes. Yet few ideas of man 
have been static. Few ideas have withstood the flight of 
time without modification. The gods of yesterday often 
become the evil spirits of tomorrow. But man ever seeks 
for short-cuts, panaceas, universal laws , and he is wont to 
generalize from particulars. He is wont to rationalize 
rather than to be rational. His tendency is to explain 
things to his own satisfaction instead of applying cool, 
calm logic and deliberate thought to an analysis of his 
problems. 

In the recent development of interest in childhood 
the critical attitude is more imperative than ever, because 
we must make distinction between assumptions and facts, 
facts and relationships, relationships and causality. To- 
day we have causality and finality and banality frequently 
linked together. Assumptions are accepted all too fre- 
quently as facts, and elaborate systems are built thereon. 

The child is too often interpreted as a pocket edition 
of an adult, and is oriented and judged in terms of adult 
standards, principles, and experiences. In reality, the 
child lives in a world that is not a child’s world, a world 
that molds him before he is an integral part of it. Hence, 
both the child and his world deserve analysis. 

It has ever been man’s wont to extract truth from and 
by generalizations. It is not so many years ago since as- 
trology determined human destiny. The sun, moon, and 
stars exerted their direct influence on men and nations. 
One needed only a horoscope to determine the destiny of 
his own individual life or that of his offspring. But as- 
trology led to astronomy. 

It is not so many centuries ago that Pythagoras con- 


120 INTELLIGENT PARENTHOOD 


sidered earth, air, fire, and water properly combined the 
requisite for health. The Romans prided themselves on 
their superiority and accounted for it on the basis of their 
geographic location. Thus we might recount many con- 
cepts of climatic influences that have come and gone. In- 
deed, many of us can remember that a generation ago the 
second summer was deemed very dangerous for infants. 
I know that some of the younger ones present were living 
through that dangerous second summer, and they cannot 
realize the anxiety of their mothers. Some of you laugh at 
that, yet within your time when there was an epidemic of 
infantile paralysis, there was just as much ignorance, 
fear, and hysterical anxiety. There was little rationality. 
Fear had seized the whole multitude and for a time many 
people went back to a belief in demoniac possession, and 
others reverted to wearing camphor bags around their 
necks as amulets. How many people now living have worn 
bags of asafetida around the neck, and how many still be- 
lieve that red flannel is good for rheumatism? How many 
pin their faith to horse chestnuts carried in their pockets? 
Yet those were current practiced doctrines and beliefs of 
a generation ago; and some of them, despite their un- 
scientific nature, have not yet been completely rejected. 
They may appear humorous because they are not as com- 
mon as they were. But they once had a social sanction. 

It is popular to ascribe as much as possible to heredi- 
ty. It appears satisfying to many to attribute everything 
to it. It saves us from all responsibility, and throws it 
back upon our ancestors. “It is in the blood—too bad— 
can’t do anything about it—like his grandfather on his 
father’s side.” If it is a desirable trait perhaps it comes 
from the grandmother on the mother’s side. In other 


IMPORTANCE OF EARLY YEARS 12] 


words we accept a phase of incomplete scientific investi- 
gation as though it were dogmatic and absolute, determin- 
ing without any question the lives of our children. He- 
redity has been held responsible for almost everything— 
blindness, syphilis, feeble-mindedness, nervous and men- 
tal diseases, traits, and dispositions, abilities and disabil- 
ities, moral and immoral habits and characteristics, social 
status, and what not. And yet Dr. Gesell has the temerity 
to say that he regards biology as important but not a dom- 
inant feature. Jennings goes a bit farther and says, 
“More properly, characteristics are not inherited at all; 
what one inherits is certain material that under certain 
conditions will produce certain characteristics; if the con- 
ditions are not supplied some other characteristic is pro- 
duced.” What could be more explicit? If things turn out 
as they turn out, they turn out that way; if they do not, 
they do not. I might continue to analyze this hereditary, 
biologic determinism and accept it as the excuse and ex- 
planation for much still undetermined. Biology with its 
data on heredity, Mendelianism, and eugenic selection 
possesses undeniable importance as a science, but to re- 
gard it today as a complete determinism is contrary to the 
facts thus far established. 

There is another determinism which is very popular 
today—endocrinology. Naccarati and Garrett go so far 
as to show that the ratio of the arms and legs to the trunk 
is related to emotional and intellectual life, and that these 
are determined by the action of the endocrine. This endo- 
crine relation has not been actually established. Do you 
_ believe that Napoleon was a failure because his pituitary 
gland broke down? Do you believe that Theodore Roose- 
velt was such an unusually fine parent because he pos- 


122 INTELLIGENT PARENTHOOD 


sessed excellent adrenal glands? Yet these are specific al- 
legations that have been made by endocrinologists. Of 
course Napoleon was dead and so was Roosevelt at the 
time that these endocrinologic explanations were made 
with fanatic assurance. Life is not all physics and chem- 
istry. Dunham states, “The vegetative nervous system 
and the endocrine organs reacting involuntarily to physi- 
co-chemical stimuli automatically produce the phenomena 
of behavior while the unique analysers of the brain at- 
tempt to control inharmonious tendencies by the voluntary 
organization of conduct according to cultural standards.” 
But life is more than endocrines; life is more than thy- 
roids and adrenals and thymuses, useful as they are. The 
study of these ductless gland systems may add some con- 
tribution to our knowledge, but most of present-day endo- 
crinological determinism reveals a wide use of the imagi- 
nation, dependence on speculation, and an overdeveloped 
enthusiasm for creating a fantastic hypothetic world in 
which the endocrinologist at least deems his theories safe 
from attack. 

I doubt whether you are all willing to believe that all 
of life, will, intelligence, emotions, spirit, artistry, inge- 
nuity, initiative, spontaneity, pugnacity, or reticence are 
determined solely by some one gland or a small group of 
glands whose bodily function is still undetermined. Nor 
is it known how or why they are set in motion. If the en- 
docrines regulate the body, what regulates the endocrines ? 
Physics and chemistry do not answer that question; and 
physics and chemistry from an endocrinological stand- 
point cannot solve and do not solve many of the problems 
of human life or the vagaries of human behavior. 

There are numerous factors in the environment which 


IMPORTANCE OF EARLY YEARS 123 


exert significant temporary or permanent pressures. I 
recognize the effects of the physical environment, the 
pressures for food, and the stresses of climate that affect 
growth and disposition. These admittedly influence our 
thoughts and our activities. Their effects are given less 
attention than is bestowed upon the psychological deter- 
minism known as behaviorism. 

Dr. Watson has propounded an interesting and ar- 
resting psychological theory. It is convenient to reduce 
life and its reactions to conditioned reflexes » but character 
consists of more than reflexes. Practically, life and be- 
havior cannot be analyzed into their component reflexes. 
I should like to hear Dr. Baldwin interpret the actions of 
the two-year-old child who tried to throw its arms around 
another two-year-old child in terms of reflexes. The con- 
ditioned reflexes which initiated that particular form of 
motor expression baflle analysis. Life, growth, thought, 
speech, are not merely matters of subvocal muscular activ- 
ity. Behaviorism has made a contribution to our thoughts 
upon habits and training, but it has not disclosed the 
foundations of character. Behaviorism takes no cogni- 
zance of ethics, of religion, of spirituality, of a soul; it is 
thoroughly mechanistic. At the present time a determin- 
ism that bereaves us of all of these values which enrich 
life has to be very carefully scrutinized while we try to 
interpret its deterministic implications for the growing 
generation. 

I now approach another school of determinism which 
lays its emphasis upon a psychical phase of life. There is 
a vigorous, almost militant group that claims that the de- 
terminisms of life are resident in the intellect. I am not so 
sure that the intellect can be definitely located, but wher- 


124 INTELLIGENT PARENTHOOD 


ever it is, it is the vital instrument in fashioning and de- 
termining the quality and quantity of life. The intellect 
within its limitations determines sensation, perception, 
ideation; it indicates our potentalities ; it forecasts to some 
extent our vocational trends and aptitudes. Nevertheless 
one dare not assume that genius will perform in accord 
with its promise. High intellectual power is not a deter- 
ministic factor, though it is assuredly an important factor 
in the life of the child. As Dr. Baidwin remarked, merely 
to know the I.Q. is insufficient. The I.Q. may be high and 
the character quotient may be low or the I.Q. may be low 
and the character quotient may be high. So many emo- 
tional and social elements enter into the value of the intel- 
lect that Dunlap has even raised the question as to 
whether we should breed through genius or around genius. 
There is reason to give serious thought to Goddard’s com- 
ment: ‘Responsibility varies according to the intelli- 
gence.” The ardent believers in this intellect determinism 
are satisfied to account for much of truancy, laziness, 
pauperism, delinquency, and crime on the simple basis of 
intellectual inferiority. Their view is illustrated by the 
statement, “We may say that every feeble-minded person 
is a potential drunkard.” Shades of our forefathers ! 

If we go behind the intellectual determinists we come 
to those who stress the instincts and impulses. They offer 
a tremendous group of determinisms. They deal with 
both the hereditary and acquired characteristics of our in- 
stincts and emotions. Whether the emotions be regarded 
as the feeling phase of instincts or as the cores of com- 


plexes is immaterial. While practically all groups build — 


up subconscious realms we have distinguishable theories. 
Some expound a doctrine based upon a belief in a collec- 


a 


IMPORTANCE OF EARLY YEARS 125 


tive consciousness, others express their views in terms of 
organic inferiority. Both interpret with confidence the 
nature and development of the desires and wishes, senti- 
ments and interests in values, which theoretically should 
have tremendous import for later life. Are the propo- 
nents of these theories dealing with basic facts or with 
assumptions? Are their theories founded upon proved, 
demonstrable, tangible work or evidence, or are they out- 
growths of philosophic thinking? They have grown out 
of thought and assumptions; and the assumptions have 
been forgotten while the system of thought has remained. 
Many of the postulated premises have not been examined 
for many years. If the premises are unfounded the struc- 
ture raised upon them is not proof against attack. 

Childhood with its self-assertion lacks the experi- 
mental background for weighing realities. The instincts 
are said to be the powerful determiners for meeting life- 
situations. Some believe in one instinct, as Freud former- 
ly did; some believe in several; some believe in many. 
One’s viewpoint determines a belief in four, fifty-seven, 
or more. The number may be immaterial, but it is im- 
portant whether one accepts unquestioningly the underly- 
ing thinking in terms of F reud, or Watson, or McDougall, 
or Thorndike. Which one of them is correct beyond a 
doubt? Their work involves taking apart something in- 
tangible for purposes of study and analysis. Their doc- 
trines do not call for immediate wholesale adoption and 
application to every phase of daily life. 

At the present time many mothers are anxious lest 
they foster the development of unconscious conflicts in 
their children—conflicts that might dominate their lives 
and ruin them. Introspective psychology has endangered 


126 INTELLIGENT PARENTHOOD 


the peace of homes because undue popularization has 
thwarted reason and judgment. As a matter of fact there 
is a great question as to how much conflict in child life is 
of the pattern alleged and urged by Freud. Dr. Freud 
claims that the child’s onanism from suckling, his sexual 
curiosity, with all the implications of the castration com- 
plex and the Oedipus complex are to form the basis of his 
future thought and action. Such subconscious motivation 
developed during infancy and childhood is assumed by the 
leader of the psychoanalytic school, whose work has been 
mainly with neurotic adults, and not with normal children. 
Dr. William Stern, however, a leading spirit in genetic 
psychology, referring to this dogmatic position remarks, 
“The unprejudiced observation of healthy children gives 
no support to this assertion.” 

The Freudian philosophy and practice during the 
past few years, although a very valuable contribution, 
have been responsible for much harm because people have 
not recognized that, while it originated a system for ex- 
plaining and meeting the problems of neurotic adults, it 
has been applied to phases of infantile and juvenile devel- 
opment. Its foundations do not rest upon established or 
accepted facts that warrant its deterministic claims. It 
has not been proved that dreams are wish fulfilments; it 
has not been proved that fears arise from hidden impulses 
of an undesirable sort; it has not been proved that chil- 
dren are trying to repress and control memories. Nor has 
it been proved that chorea (St. Vitus’ dance) represents a 
regression to the time that a child is struggling to be born, 
as claimed by Dr. Rank. And yet that is sound doctrine to 
those who believe it. | 

Are you willing to accept, as proved, the theory that 


IMPORTANCE OF EARLY YEARS 127 


rhyme-making by little children is erotic excitation? Do 
you accept as fact that your child, when playing with 
plasticine and molding clay and trying’ to be a sculptor, is 
merely giving evidence of coprophilic instinct? Do you 
believe that an underlying infantile interest in the phe- 
nomena of defecation is the actual basis of his later thrift? 
These concepts form part of the orthodox theory that de- 
mands recognition as a psychic determinism. Who is pre- 
pared to accept as truth the implications of this sentence 
in A Study of the Mental Life of the Child? “Indeed it is 
not going too far to search for the basis of everything that 
goes wrong with a child, in his own sexual life, or that of 
the persons with whom he has to do.” I have called the 
psychoanalytic theories a determinism, and I derive my 
greatest support from Rank’s statement “Psycho-analy- 
sis has shown the strict determinism that rules in the 
psychic life.” 

This is just another example of our seizing an idea 
and swallowing it without knowing whether it has been 
properly cooked or prepared, whether it is safe or sani- 
tary, or whether it contains the nutrients we need. Itis an 
unbalanced psychologic diet for parents and others feed- 
ing the minds of children. 

I must not overlook the social determinisms involving 
social compulsions of many kinds. I know that familial 
and communal wealth and health, companionships and so- 
cial status, knowledge of aesthetics and ethical codes are 
all things which help to determine childhood. The social 
sanctions are forces, but they are not the sole determiners. 
The social pressures and compulsions are profoundly im- 
portant, through direct and indirect suggestion, in formu- 
lating the habits, traits, and ideals of growing children. 


128 INTELLIGENT PARENTHOOD 


Such an excellent sociologist as Ellwood, however, does 
not believe in a complete social determinism of individual 
behavior, because he remarks, “Man develops his varia- 
_ tions physically and mentally.” 

I might go on and enumerate determinism after 
determinism, such as the stimulations and inhibitions 
through the interactions of man as his own environing 
force. We are all familiar with economic determinism— 
the Marxian philosophy in which man becomes a passive 
agent upon whom is visited all the disturbances of the 
economic system. Few concede that man is simply a pas- 
sive reflex of his environment. I might discuss child-de- 
velopment, through moral and ethical determinisms; or in 
terms of theological determinisms, with ideas of original 
sin, fear of God, and a future life; or in terms of govern- 
mental determinisms and the laws of loyalty. All hold in- 
trenched positions as determinisms. 

Childhood is a period of the growth of the mind, a pe- 
riod for the development and integration of the entire 
child, who functions as a whole, and not with one part at 
a time. He is integrated functionally, and thus is a psy- 
cho-biologic unit. To focus attention upon any one part 
of his organization is helpful only for purposes of scien- 
tific investigation, but then every ascertained fact must be 
related to all the other known facts in order to learn its 
deterministic values. 

To recapitulate, childhood is not subject to a single 
determinism, but multiple determinisms are constantly at 
work. Intellectual, physical, emotional, and social forces, 
however subdivided or named, are mutually interacting 
and effective determinisms. The especial importance of 
childhood lies in the fact that it embraces the period of the 


IMPORTANCE OF EARLY YEARS 129 


summation of all of these determinisms which constitute 
and delimit the personality that is ever struggling to de- 
termine for itself. In fine, the simple truth is expressed 
in the words of E. R. Downing: ‘The destiny of the indi- 
vidual is the resultant of heredity (what he is), environ- 
ment (what he has), and training (what he does), and no 
one element can be omitted in calculating the result.” 
Hence, all the determinisms of childhood are real, but no 
one is the reality. Life is personality, life is experience, 
and life is environment. 


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ROUND TABLE DISCUSSION: RE- 
SEARCH POSSIBILITIES IN 
NURSERY SCHOOLS 


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RESEARCH POSSIBILITIES IN NURSERY 
SCHOOLS 


The group interested in Research Possibilities in 
Nursery Schools met at 1:30 immediately following the 
luncheon, Mrs. Alfred S. Alschuler, Staff Director of 
Franklin Nursery School, presiding. 

CHAIRMAN ALSCHULER: Just a week ago, a number of 
us who are gathered here today met in Washington for the 
first national conference of nursery school workers ever 
held. It was, I think, rather astonishing to us to realize 
ourselves as an educational group, and to know that we 
were recognized, because not more than four or five years 
ago we as individual nursery school workers had to be 
possessed of great faith—almost of audacity—to ac- 
knowledge ourselves as nursery school workers. 

That we were taking the young child away from its 
home where it belonged and that we were relieving the 
mother of too much responsibility were some of the charges 
made against us. Meantime the movement has grown with 
astonishing rapidity and now we are fearful that it may 
grow so quickly that it will be crystallized before it has 
been properly defined. We are convinced that children are 
benefitted, that they are stabilized and better developed in 
coming to us, but we are still trying to find out many 
things about our program. How much and what kinds of 
activity should young children have? How much intellec- 
tual stimulus and content is desirable? What elements 


133 


134 INTELLIGENT PARENTHOOD 


make for soundest physical development? We are quiz- 
zing ourselves about all of these things. We are quite cer- 
tain that it is advantageous for children to have some sort 
of group experience, but we do not know how much pro- 
gram and group life is altogether beneficial. We know 
comparatively little as yet about the responses of very 
young children to rhythm; we are trying to learn some- 
thing about their responses and reactions to each other 
and to various types of equipment. All of these things are 
being watched and noted in a number of nursery schools 
in as many different ways. It is for that reason that we 
thought it would be interesting today, to discuss some of 
the research possibilities in nursery school work. 

One of the most interesting aspects of the Conference 
in Washington was descriptions given of different types 
of nursery schools operating under different conditions. 
Practically everyone is trying to discover and develop 
material along different lines. Dr. Bird T. Baldwin re- 
ported that in the Preschool Laboratories at Iowa State 
University, where he is directing that work, careful charts 
are being made of norms as they find them of physical 
and mental development. Here in Chicago we have a 
number of nursery schools making different approaches 
to nursery school needs. But we will take as a basis of 
discussion today the work going on in one school, the 
Franklin Nursery School, unique perhaps because it is in 
a public school, because its entire program—eating, sleep- 
ing, and playing—is carried on in one room 28X80 feet 
in size, and because it is peculiarly fortunate in being able 
to do a piece of careful scientific work by co-operating 
with existent agencies who in turn use the nursery school 


NURSERY SCHOOLS 135 


as a source of scientific data. The physical health work is 
under the direction of the Elizabeth McCormick Memorial 
Fund, and the mental health program is in the hands of 
the Institute for Juvenile Research. 

I think first we should like to hear from Miss Mary 
Murphy. Many of you know the Elizabeth McCormick 
Memorial Fund as one of the strong social constructive 
forces in the city. However, none of you who has not had 
the joy of working with them could know the beauty and 
the value of the kind of co-operation which they give, nor 
could you know of the care with which they develop and 
execute their plans from day to day and month to month. 

It is with great pleasure that I introduce to you Miss 
Mary Murphy, Director of the Elizabeth McCormick 
Memorial Fund. ee 


PHYSICAL HEALTH PROGRAM 


Mary EL. Murphy, Director, Elizabeth McCormick 
Memorial Fund 

The Elizabeth McCormick Memorial Fund has as its 
part of the program at the Franklin N ursery School the 
phases relating to the physical care of the children. This 
does not include the daily inspection for contagious dis- 
eases, this service being rendered by the Department of 
Health. The work of the Fund includes the regular super- 
vision of the children by a pediatrician and a nutrition 
specialist, together with a supervision of the dietary and 
the education of the parents in regard to the care of their 
children. 

Each child is given a complete physical examination, 
the mother being present. An examination is never given 


136 INTELLIGENT PARENTHOOD 


except in the presence of one of the parents, since it is 
believed that the educational factor in such an examina- 
tion plays a large part in the point of view which the 


parent must have in order to maintain health in the child. | 


The physician not only gives the original examination, 
but checks regularly on the condition of the child. 

The children of the nursery school are weighed each 
week by the nutrition specialist in charge, and are meas- 
ured each month for standing height, sitting height, and 
arm span. In addition to the regular contact with the 
parent and child at the time of the examination, there has 
been established a monthly conference with the mother, a 
regular appointment being made, with ample time pre- 
- vided for a satisfactory discussion of the child’s progress 
and needs. The pediatrician, the nutrition specialist, and 
the educational director of the school attend this confer- 
ence, which has as its chief objective the welfare of the 
child. 

In addition, the homes are visited and instruction 
given to the mother on the program which should be fol- 
lowed in the home. Full information as to what food is 
provided for the child at home, what are the hours of sleep 
and the home’s program of activity, is recorded as a basis 
for recommendations to the mother. 

The nursery-school program includes feedings of 
cod-liver oil and orange juice in the mid-morning, and 
half a pint of milk and one graham cracker in the after- 
noon, and a dinner served at noon. The nutrition special- 
ist in charge has planned the menus, the preparation of 
which is carried out in the kitchen of the regular school. 

The Elizabeth McCormick Memorial Fund in its con- 
nection with this nursery school has two interests: first, a 


Nee 


NURSERY SCHOOLS 137 


service to the children and the promotion of education 
among parents on the physical care of children, and, sec- 
ond, research. The results of such research, conducted 
among so limited a number of children, are of value chiefly 
as they offer themselves as a contribution to larger studies. 
We are interested in keeping very careful data, so that 
our knowledge of the physical development of the young 
child may gain through the contact provided in the nurs- 
ery school. 

We also are aware of the interrelationship of the 
physical condition and the mental and emotional phases 
of the child’s development, and any consideration of the 
child’s response to his environment and to the program 
provided as expressed in physical development must in- 
clude these factors. Since, however, this particular phase 
of the program at the nursery school is in charge of the 
Institute for Juvenile Research and will be reported later 
by Miss Kawin, we shall confine ourselves to consideration 
of the opportunities for study in the physical field alone. 

Because we feel that the record of growth is a rich 
source of study, very careful measurements are being 
taken and detailed records kept. Such a growth record 
has, I believe, a two-fold significance. Data collected 
regularly over a long period of time should be of value in 
setting up more accurate standards of growth than those 
yet available. Moreover, using our present standards as 
an approximation of the progress a child should make, the 
data assembled in the nursery school are full of possibil- 
ities. The effectiveness of a balanced program of activity 
and rest, of interests and equipment adapted to the child’s 
needs, and a dietary provided at the school assumed to be 
adequate, is being studied in the Franklin Nursery Schoo) 


138 INTELLIGENT PARENTHOOD 


in terms of physical growth, as recorded in careful meas- 
urements, and in the physical condition as noted by the 
periodic examination of the pediatrician. Furthermore, 
the relationship between the record of growth and the 
findings of the pediatrician should furnish a contribution 
to a study of the value of growth measurements as an in- 
dex of a child’s health. 

The service, which includes the early detection of de- 
fects and their correction, establishment of good nutrition 
and of health habits conducive to proper development, 
with careful education of the home, cannot be adequately 
measured in terms of the physical development of the 
child during the limited period of the child’s stay in the 
nursery school. Further studies are planned of these chil- 
dren over a period of years, with controls selected from 
among school children who have not had the program 
provided in the nursery school. We plan to follow these 
children long enough to determine, if possible, whether the 
early dental care and other corrections, the establishment 
of nutrition, good habits of sleep, food, and activity will 
show results in physical well-being. 

We hope also that the studies of these children may 
become contributions to other data being assembled by our 
own organization and others interested in child develop- 
ment which will help to erect more adequate standards 
than now exist, according to age, of physical development 
and physical performance. 

The great possibilities of the nursery school lie, we 
fee], not only in the social and educational service, but in 
the field of research, which offers opportunities to work 
for even broader and more lasting results. 


NURSERY SCHOOLS 139 


Cuamman Arscuuter: As Miss Murphy has said 
we in our school situation are not at the present moment 
trying to demonstrate or reveal any ‘one thing, as, for 
example, at Columbia University in Miss Hill’s depart- 
ment, motor and language responses of very young chil- 
dren are being noted at six months intervals. I have asked 
Miss Hill and some of the other participants of this morn- 
ing’s program to lead the discussion after Miss Kawin has 
talked. Miss Ethel Kawin, our next speaker, is known to 
many of you through her work in Chicago in the voca- 
tional division of the Board of Education. She has within 
the past year associated herself with the Institute for 
Juvenile Research. She is in charge of the Nursery 
School Research Program, which is in process of develop- 
ment. Dr. Herman Adler, Director of the Institute, re- 
cently remarked to me that he considered the addition of 
Miss Kawin to their staff one of the finest things that had 
happened at the Institute for some time. 


MENTAL HEALTH PROGRAM 


Ethel Kawin, Director, Preschool Research, Institute of 
Juvenile Research 


Dr. Baldwin told you this morning, I think, that they 
regard their preschool laboratories in Iowa almost as a 
preschool child itself, just learning to toddle. If the work 
they are doing in Iowa may be called a preschool child, I 
am afraid that the project which I am going to try to de- 
scribe to you briefly might almost be said to be still in the 
prenatal stage, because we have been functioning just two 
months. 

Ernest D. Burton, late president of the University of 


140 INTELLIGENT PARENTHOOD 


Chicago, once defined research as “pushing the boundaries 
of our knowledge out a little farther over the vast wilder- 
ness of our ignorance.” This vivid and stimulating de- 
scription which defines research as a great adventure into 
the land of the unknown is especially applicable to the 
field of human behavior. 

Man’s search for self-understanding and self-mastery 
is as old as the soothsayers, but, from the standpoint of 
actual scientific knowledge, the area of the known is a 
very, very tiny realm, a mere speck in comparison with the 
vast areas that remain to be explored. It is in this spirit 
of trying to push the boundaries of knowledge out a little 
farther over the vast wilderness of ignorance that the In- 
stitute for Juvenile Research has, within the past few 
months, set up a research station in connection with work 
for the preschool child and the nursery-school child. 

I am going to try to describe to you very briefly the 
nature of our set-up and how we came to be in existence. 

It happened that this past autumn the Institute for 
Juvenile Research, which, as most of you know, is a state 
organization of which Dr. Herman Adler is the director, 
received requests from four different nursery schools 
simultaneously, asking us for psychological and psychia- 
tric service in their schools. 

We considered the matter very carefully, and, inas- 
much as the demand seemed to be such a community de- 
mand, and the Institute tries to serve all citizens of the 
state as much as possible in their requests for service, Dr. 
Adler decided we would set up a special division of re- 
search for the preschool child, and assigned to me the 
privilege of organizing this branch of work. 

We are working in three nursery schools; we have 


NURSERY SCHOOLS 141 


been sorry not to be able to answer the requests of other 
nursery schools for service, but, for the first six months 
we felt that was all we should undertake, in order to do a 
fairly thorough job. 

The three schools are the Children’s Community 
School, the Franklin School, which you have already 
heard about as the first nursery school in a public school, 
and the nursery school at Hull-House, which is run by the 
National Kindergarten and Elementary College. 

The Institute for Juvenile Research has, through the 
generous invitation of Miss Jane Addams, headquarters 
at Hull-House. We have there conference rooms and 
offices, a children’s playroom where children may be 
brought for observed play, and a room for mental-testing 
and psychiatric examination. 

What we feel is particularly unique about the set-up 
we have at Hull-House is the fact that the Mary Crane 
Nursery Building, where our headquarters are located, is 
a unit building for, primarily, well children. I mean it is 
not at all in the nature of a dispensary, but Hull-House 
devotes that building to the welfare of children, and we 
are a unit of co-operating organizations that have existed 
in the community for work with children. 

The National Kindergarten College, which is the 
educational organization, is operating the nursery school. 
The physical examinations are done by the Infant Wel- 
fare Society, and they are also doing nutritional work for 
children from the ages of two to six. The nutritional work 
for children over six is being done by the Elizabeth Mc- 
Cormick Memorial Fund which Miss Murphy represents, 
and we, the Institute for Juvenile Research, are organiz- 
ing the psychiatric and psychological work. 


142 INTELLIGENT PARENTHOOD 


So far as we know, that is a slightly different set-up 
from that existing anywhere else in a nursery-school re- 
search station, and what we are particularly hoping that 
we may demonstrate here is the possibility of co-operative _ 
research for children being done by the civic and com- 
munity agencies already in existence in a well-organized 
community. 

I am going to skip over a descript‘on of our staff, be- 
cause in this limited time that would not be of great inter- 
est to you, except to mention that we have the part-time 
of a psychiatrist; we have two psychologists, one of them 
part-time, a psychiatric social worker, and a worker espe- 
cially trained for nursery-school work. The service which 
we are rendering in the schools consists of psychological 
examinations, a psychiatric examination where it seems 
advisable, and, in addition, especial observation of be- 
havior problems wherever the need seems apparent. But 
it is not particularly on the service end of our work that 
I am talking to you today, and, as research really is our 
major objective, I shall go on briefly to describe what we 
are hoping to do in the way of research work. 

Our main interest, of course, is the psychological and 
psychiatric research. We are giving every child in these 
nursery schools an intelligence test. We are using the 
Stanford-Binet, first, for children of three years of age 
and over; the Kuhlman-Binet for children under three. 
We hope after that program to go on and carry out the 
tests worked out at the Merrill Palmer School by Dr. 
Stutsman for preschool children, and, after that to use 
the Gesell tests, the Detroit kindergarten tests, and the 
Pintner-Patterson and others adapted to young children. 

What I would like to bring out particularly is that 





NURSERY SCHOOLS 143 


we are not interested in using intelligence tests in order 
to learn the 1.Q. of the child alone. We are trying to use 
the intelligence tests analytically. I shall illustrate briefly 
by one or two case illustrations. 

We are trying to bring out through our Stanford- 
Binet test the special defects and special abilities of the 
child (with the hope, of course, that we can help him to 
overcome the disabilities). 

For example, one of the children I tested recently 
was an especially interesting contrast in his low ability 
on the language tests and his high ability on the perform- 
ance tests. Whenever we came to a part of the test that 
required language or vocabulary for the answer, he got 
panicky and came out with a painful wail, “Miss Kawin, 
I don’t know! But I don’t know! Miss Kawin!’’ 

One might have an idea, from that, that the child was, 
perhaps, slightly retarded, but, on the other hand, when 
he came to the level where he was required to count thir- 
teen pennies, I laid them out, and, quick as a flash he 
counted all the way up to thirteen, and then, without a 
moment’s hesitation came out with this, “And eleven of 
them are Indians, and two are Lincolns!” No child that 
I had ever tested had made that observation, and it had 
not occurred to me to notice whether I laid out Lincoln or 
Indian pennies. 

We also hope that we can do some studies of the reac- 
tions of children to intelligence testing in so far as the in- 
telligence tests indicate important personality traits. One 
of the things we have under way now is a study of the 
way the individual child reacts when he reaches that part 
of the intelligence test which begins to be too difficult for 
him and which he cannot do. I believe, and I think there 


144 INTELLIGENT PARENTHOOD 


are many people who believe, that there we may get at one 
of the basic traits of human character, and one of the most 
helpful indications of the problem to: which we must help 
the child adjust for his future satisfaction in life. Most of 
us adults who fail here and there fail because we are not 
able to meet problem situations satisfactorily. Now, how 
does the child meet the problem when he comes to the 
point where he no longer can perform the task? 

A week or so ago I had a startling contrast of that 
sort presented in two children. There was a delightful 
boy in our Franklin Nursery School who is a combination 
of Japanese and Irish—a very intelligent youngster. 
When he came to those parts of the intelligence test where 
he could not answer the questions, he said, in a perfectly 
straightforward adult manner, “I don’t know, my father 
never taught me that,” or “I don’t know, I haven’t learned 
that.” Or, where he was supposed to draw something— 
some figure—he would say, “I don’t understand how that 
was made.” He didn’t bluff, he didn’t shrink. He came 
forward and, in a straight, matter-of-fact way, said, “I 
don’t know.” 

The next child whom I tested, began, when he came 
to the difficult things, to whimper and grow restless, to 
want to go back to the Nursery School room and, finally, 
to begin to cry and want his “mama.” I looked at the clock 
and noticed it was nearly luncheon time, and I thought it 
might be possible he was tired and hungry, so I quieted 
him and went back to some of the easier things that I 
thought he could do. Immediately, he was all smiles and 
co-operation, thereby indicating quite clearly that it was 
not just fatigue and hunger. When I turned back to the 
difficult things, he again began to cry and want his mother. 


NURSERY SCHOOLS 145 


It is that sort of a personality reaction that seems to 
me one of the significant things to be learned from the 
analytic use of the intelligence test. It is our problem to 
teach that child to meet life in some other way instead of 
whimpering and wanting his mother when he comes to 
the difficult situations. 

We are hoping to make studies of the emotional reac- 
tions of the young child. But that is a very difficult field 
in which to formulate scientific research problems, and we 
are going at it very slowly. We have been much interested 
in the research material put out by the University of Iowa 
Welfare Research Station, and hope to organize some- 
thing that will be similarly valuable in indicating these 
early emotional reactions. We are particularly interested, 
therefore, in studying children in conflict situations, part- 
ly because we are interested in the Dewey theory that 
emotion is a product of a conflict situation, and partly be- 
cause we think that the way of meeting such problem 
situations is a very important part of the child’s person- 
ality, as I have indicated. 

We hope to study the children in controlled conflict 
situations which we shall create in our laboratory and in 
the natural conflict situations that arise in the course of a 
nursery-school day. We are interested in various kinds of 
conflict: the kind of conflict the child has with authority, 
the kind that the child has with his own desire as conflict- 
ing with his own inadequacy or incapacity to carry out 
that desire, the conflict of two conflicting desires in the 
child’s own nature, and then, perhaps, in the conflict of 
the child’s desire with the desire of another child. We are 
at present doing a preliminary investigation on emotional 
situations in the hope that out of those we may be able to 


146 INTELLIGENT PARENTHOOD 


formulate a research problem. We have our workers in 
the nursery schcols writing objective descriptions of the 
outbursts of emotion that appear in the children quite 
spontaneously, temper and sulking, etc., and then at- . 
tempting to describe the situation (in so far as it has been 
observable), which seemed to be producing that reaction. 

We are hoping to do some studies in the value of free 
play, and the children’s reactions in free play, and to 
study children in our controlled-play room, playing by 
themselves in free play, and then each child playing with 
every other child one by one in the nursery school to see 
if we can get observations on the way children react in 
pairs, that is, to see how each child in the school reacts 
when he is playing individually with every other child in 
the school, to see what are the reactions of these different 
personalities on each other. 

There is so much that one might talk about, it is very 
hard to choose the subjects for a brief talk like this, but 
perhaps in closing I would best skip more of the detail of 
our own work, or the things we hope to do in the line of 
physiological and nutritional research, as Miss Murphy 
has indicated, and mention briefly three things that we 
hope in the future to do: We would like very much to be 
able to help the nursery schools prove their own tech- 
niques from the standpoint of scientific research—ques- 
tions that bother them in the organization of their daily 
program. For instance, how much relaxation should the 
children have, and what is the value of relaxation? What 
are the symptoms of fatigue? What are the symptoms of 
overstimulation, if there is such a thing? That is the type 
of problem we hope to help them with, but it is very diffi- 
cult to formulate those into problems that can be scien- 


NURSERY SCHOOLS 147 


tifically studied, and we therefore feel that will have to 
be a matter of development that will take some time. 

We are also hoping to organize centers for students’ 
training. We already have some of the kindergarten stu- 
dents coming to us, for occasional lectures and observa- 
tion, and we hope, in the future, to have a center for par- 
ent education. We feel what we are learning in our 
research on children should be available for mothers as 
soon as we can make it so. Thirdly, we hope to have 
there at Hull-House a research center in which people in 
all fields of work that bear directly on the preschool child 
will come and conduct independent scientific research 
studies so that co-operatively we may gain more and more 
knowledge about this preschool child, about whom so little 
as yet is known. 

Cuairman AtscHULER: We have a very few moments 
left for discussion. You have, I am sure, realized some of 
the needs and values of the kind of co-operation we are 
getting through these agencies, and you have had perhaps 
a little indication of some of the fun we are having in find- 
ing out about young children. Last week in Washington, 
Miss Hill may remember, I regretted that we had no op- 
portunity to talk about differences in techniques, proce- 
dures, objectives, and programs. In the brief time now 
remaining, I think we should like to hear something about 
other research programs. Miss Hill, would you tell us of 
the work going forward along this line in your Nursery 
School at Teacher’s College, New York? 

Miss Parry Smrtu Hit: I wish very much that the 
people who had charge of the research could report to you 
instead of my attempting to do so. Dr. Bess Cunningham 


148 INTELLIGENT PARENTHOOD 


has been our chairman since 1928. We had to sneak in the 
first nursery school we ever had. The authorities would 
never in the world have consented to letting two-year-old 
babies get in. The first year we acted just on common 
sense and did not try to do any research. We kept the 
children out of doors as much as possible in care of the 
teacher in our kindergarten who had shown the greatest 
aptitude with younger children. Then, as we felt we 
wanted to learn everything England could teach us, we in- 
vited Miss Grace Owens to come to us. 

Then it was that we began regular research. I shall 
speak of just one project as I believe the data on the 
weighing and measuring of children and all of the physi- 
cal examinations have been reported. We have gotten 
most interesting material along the line of nutrition, on 
the importance of the egg in a child’s diet; it is not yet 
complete. Dr. Rose who has conducted the experiment is 
more and more convinced of the importance of an egg a 
day in keeping certain forms of disease away from chil- 
dren. I really dare not undertake to speak for our re- 
search workers. We are, however, I might mention, tre- 
mendously interested in the effect of language approval 
given to children on improvement. Mrs. Waring, who is 
working out her doctor’s dissertation along this line, has 
planned certain types of work with children in the kin- 
dergarten, and grade, in which one group of children, 
when they make a success, have to get the whole sense of 
satisfaction out of their own knowledge that the thing is 
successful. The child draws his own conclusions, and 
nothing is said. 


NURSERY SCHOOLS 149 


In the other group, when the child makes a satisfac- 
tory response, the teacher says, “That is good” or “That 
is right,” giving a word of encouragement, and, as far as 
that research has gone (it is not complete, the dissertation 
is not yet written, though it is in the process of being writ- 
ten), we have been greatly impressed with the more rapid 
improvement from the children who have the commenda- 
tion of other people on their efforts to succeed. Now, the 
other lines of research, as I say, I couldn’t touch upon; 
they are too numerous, but I thought that one was a little 
unique, and so gave it. 

Cuainman AuscHutEer: I wonder if Dr. Baldwin 
would speak to us. We appreciate hearing from Dr. Hill, 
and I think reports along these lines are stimulating and 
enlightening. Dr. Baldwin, will you talk to us? 

Dr. Batpwin: Perhaps during these few minutes I 
might suggest some of the studies that we have completed, 
because those studies are available, or will be, very short- 
ly, and might be used to suggest other lines of attack. 

We have six studies that are now completed; the first 
one is an analytic study of the child entering school. This 
was our first preschool study, psychological study, and 
was made about five years ago. That study has been pub- 
lished. 

Another study was on the aesthetic development of 
preschool children by Dr. Wiegel. That study is now 
available, dealing with the constructive ability of young 
children. The first one, and the one that the speaker re- 
ferred to, is on the emotional development of preschool 
children, a study of introversion and extraversion by Dr. 
Marsdens. That study is very suggestive. It contains out- 
lines for breaking emotional reactions, and is available. 


150 INTELLIGENT PARENTHOOD 


Another study is on the motor control and the motor 
development of the school children. Dr. Welland made 
some sixteen to twenty thousand observations on the con- 
trol of the hand and arm of children between the ages of 
two and five years, and her studies are now ready to go to 
press. 

Another study was on language development, by Dr. 
Smith. She made an intense study of the vocabularies of 
children, and found that on an average, our two-year-old 
children use about two hundred words, while the six-year- 
old children use twenty-five hundred. These are the aver- 
ages; some use more, some less; but she has worked out a 
scale for checking the vocabulary of preschool children, 
and the last one, which is now going to press, is on the 
learning of preschool children. Dr. Kirkwood has com- 
pleted her investigations on how children learn in a sub- 
stitution test, and has rechecked learning after the lapse 
of one year and two years. 

CuairMAN ALSCHULER: We are suffering from an 
embarrassment of riches and a lack of time. We have 
Miss Edna White here, Director of the Merrill Palmer 
Foundation which has been so generous and helpful to all 
of us who have started schools since the opening of their 
nursery school. Had we more time we should have been 
so glad to hear from her and from Dr. Ira Wile. But I 
think we shall have to adjourn. 


ROUND TABLE DISCUSSION: SEX 
~ EDUCATION 





SEX EDUCATION 


The Luncheon Round Table Discussion on Sex Edu- 
cation convened at 1:15 p.m., Miss Helen Myrick pre- 
siding. 

Cuairman Myrick: Will the meeting please come to 
order. We will talk from 1:15 to 2:15, and as an introduc- 
tion to the speakers, I wish to explain that I am with the 
Illinois Society for Mental Hygiene; therefore, I am 
going to say a few words about mental hygiene and sex 
education. : 

A basic principle of mental hygiene is the prevention 
of conflict between one’s emotional, intellectual and social 
attitudes. Sex, of course, is one of the most potent fac- 
tors in one’s life. A successful adjustment in this phase 
is of the utmost importance to one’s mental hygiene. 
Through knowledge comes help, but it is not the knowl- 
edge alone, but the way in which one attains knowledge 
that is essential to the development of a constructive atti- 
tude; therefore, this program on sex education stresses the 
method of teaching. | 

The first speaker is Mrs. Sidonie Gruenberg, Direc- 
tor, Child Study Association of America. 


SEX EDUCATION VERSUS SEX INFORMATION 


Mrs. Sidonie Matsner Gruenberg, Director, 
National Child Study Association 


It is unfortunate that “sex education” has assumed in 
the public mind the standing of a fad, regarding which 


153 


154 INTELLIGENT PARENTHOOD 


one asks, ‘“Do you believe in this or that?” We are not 
called upon to believe in sex education, for it is as old as 
the race, and we cannot get away from it because of two 
inescapable facts. The first of these is the fact that human 
beings come always and everywhere as male and female. 
The second is the fact that human infants pick up their 
education from what goes on around them. Whether we 
mean it so or not, our children have in most cases acquired 
a very substantial, and often a permanent, education re- 
garding sex attitudes, sex ideals, the place of sex in life, 
sex morality before they are well in their teens. 

This education has not been, to be sure, a planned or 
purposeful guidance in important values and understand- 
ing. Indeed, for most children it has been largely built up 
by our eloquent silences, our misdirections, our evasions 
and concealments. Sex has become shameful because it 
has been hidden; it has become low because we have cast 
our eyes down at its mention; it has become nasty because 
we have treated it as unspeakable. All that, together with 
a vast body of impossible anatomy and weird physiology, 
has been the education arising from our negative and 
fearful refusal to deal with realities. In proposing sex 
education we have to consider what kind we are to have, 
not whether we are to have any. 

Sex education begins even before the child begins to 
talk, whereas sex instruction must wait until there is al- 
ready a substantial vocabulary. The child learns a great 
deal about relations of the members of the family to one 
another, their attitude, their affections, their deferences, 
their considerations. He gradually acquires certain stand- 
ards in regard to way of living and certain values and ap- 
preciations. And he comes to have ideals as to what is 


SEX EDUCATION 155 


worthy or as to what is reprehensible. He becomes frank 
or furtive, reverent or ribald, impulsive or controlled, co- 
operative or selfish, largely as a result of what goes on 
around him, what happens to him day by day, when we 
are thinking least about his education. He gets some in- 
formation too during this early period, but that is not al- 
ways so certain because too often efforts are made to 
thwart his mind. He learns, for example, a great deal 
about his own external anatomy, but he may be given at 
the same time a wholly misleading vocabulary as to the 
parts of his body. And he may be barred from discover- 
ing the external anatomy of the opposite sex. It is here, 
long before the child can ask any questions regarding sex 
and reproduction, that he should acquire familiarity with 
the basic facts of external structure, and an accurate, if 
not technical vocabulary, since it is as easy to get the 
right names for the parts of the body as the family or 
baby terms; and second, the correct terminology leaves 
nothing to be unlearned or to cause confusion later. 

Parents often make up their minds that they are not 
going to deceive their children as they had themselves 
been deceived, but then become confused and puzzled, 
waiting for the psychological moment to start something. 
Should we wait, before giving the child sex information, 
until he asks questions? 

I attended a meeting of the mothers of fifth-grade 
children in one of our modern schools where they had 
some pets, and the teacher said to the mothers, “Our 
guinea pigs are going to have young. Are your children 
prepared to witness such a phenomenon?” Of the fifteen 
mothers, seven had given their ten-year-old children sex 
information, and the others had not. One of the women, 


156 INTELLIGENT PARENTHOOD 


a physician, and the wife of a physician, said, “My daugh- 
ter of ten is not the least bit interested. She has never 
asked me a question. In fact, my son of seventeen is not. 
the least bit interested.” I turned to her and said, “Did 
you wait until the child showed a consuming curiosity for 
the population of the United States, for the kind of prod- 
ucts that they have in Texas, or Georgia before you taught 
them geography? Do you wait with other things until the 
child asks questions?” 

We do not wait for the child to ask questions before 
we give him other information, and yet we are confident 
we are not forcing his mental efforts beyond human en- 
durance. We find endless occasion to bring to his atten- 
tion and to his thought random bits of knowledge about 
the world in which he lives—some of it valuable, some of 
it merely curious. We try always to keep within the 
child’s comprehension and interest, or else we risk telling ~ 
him what simply will not enter his mind at all. It is the 
same way with information regarding sex. It need not be 
forced; but neither must it wait in every case until the 
child is both curious and capable of formulating his 
queries. Indeed, information about sex and reproduction, 
like the attitudes we wish to establish with regard to or- 
dinary relations between human beings, must come cas- 
ually and informally through our incidental conversation 
and through the comments and observations we make day 
by day. The facts of birth and death come early enough 
into the environment; we need not go out of our way 
either to find a text for a sermon or to avoid a disagree- 
able topic. There are marriages and pregnancies and— 
occasionally still—nursing mothers. There is much a 
child can and should learn long before he can ask ques- 


SEX EDUCATION 157 


tions of the kind that embarrassed cultured ladies during 
the “Age of Innocence.” 

You will remember that some years ago leading edu- 
eators succeeded in overcoming the opposition to the giv- 
ing of any kind of sex information to children—or per- 
haps the inertia, rather than opposition. In an age of 
reason it seemed only fair to extend enlightenment to 
youth. And then what happened? We built up a beautiful 
ritual in the course of which the stork myth was killed 
quite dead. This took place in the gloaming, usually, or 
at least in a dimly lighted room. The child sat on our 
knees. The speaking parts were carried on in a whisper. 
A gentle sentimentalism suffused the atmosphere. And 
after a little cool perspiration and a few spasmodic con- 
tractions in the throat, the tongue was loosened from the 
palate and the child was told, in suitable poetical lan- 
guage, that the stork is not the instrument of Fate that he 
had been supposed to be. The child, according to the lec- 
tures we were given, should have had the reaction to 
cause it to put its arms around the mother’s neck and say, 
“Mother, I love you more than ever now.” I have never 
known this reaction actually to take place. 

This enlightenment is, of course, better than encour- 
aging or tolerating the stork myth, or even ignoring the 
matter altogether. But it is not necessary to make a sol- 
emn ceremonial out of it in order to impress the child with 
the seriousness of the subject. On the other hand, sex 
and reproduction are not normally topics of table con- 
versation; and the child will soon enough discover that 
they are not subjects for promiscuous discussion in pub- 
lic. Whatever reticence may be desirable, as between the 
child and outsiders, can rest on precisely the same bases 


158 INTELLIGENT PARENTHOOD 


as his reticence regarding other matters that concern only 
himself and family. 

In recommending broad and accurate information 
presented largely in a matter-of-fact manner, we do not 
assume that the child in his early and latent period has 
any direct need for the knowledge. For many years he 
could get along in total ignorance (if that is attainable) 
of all matters regarding sex. The prime reason, however, 
for the parents giving this information lies in the fact 
that total ignorance is unattainable, considering the na- 
ture of the surrounding world and of the child himself. It 
is important that the earliest ideas and values shall be in 
every way reliable. The first impressions will be over- 
come with difficulty, if at all, so that it does matter who 
gives these impressions and what kind of impressions they 
are—whether they are to be wholesome or disgusting, 
whether they are to be associated with persons the child 
loves and respects, or with those of whom he can later 
think only with contempt and shame. For it is comforting 
to recognize that sound first impressions are just as stable 
as the unfavorable kind. I think that is something that 
parents ought to remember—that first impressions are the 
lasting ones. If favorable they are lasting, and if unfa- 
vorable they are equally lasting. 

Another consideration that distinguishes the stork 
story from the Santa Claus fable, for example, is the fact 
that in the latter case the interest is a declining one, 
whereas in the matter of sex it is steadily growing. It is 
unfair to use the argument which I have often heard ad- 
vanced that we do not tell children the truth about every- 
thing, that we tell them fairy tales, and why not tell them 
a fairy tale about birth and reproduction? 


SEX EDUCATION 159 


We know they like the stork story better than the 
other story, but you cannot compare, the two things in 
their value for the child: one is a childish phase, whereas 
the interest in sex is an adult manifestation, and you can- 
not begin on the wrong basis. I do not think that any ter- 
rible harm comes to children who have been told the stork 
story, but it is unfortunate if in guiding the child in this 
important part of his life you have to begin by saying, 
“What I told you at such and such a time is not true.” It 
is important that the knowledge elements be soundly es- 
tablished before the emotions are aroused. During ado- 
lescence, when the foremost consideration should be given 
to questions of standards and ideals, we should be able to 
take matters of fact for granted. The information is now 
needed as a basis for social and moral guidance. We 
should not need to introduce it now when every reference 
to the physical facts, or every attempt to rectify earlier 
misconceptions, must meet a highly sensitized self-con- 
sciousness. 

The sexual impulses, like all the others, represent 
inner forces which are in themselves without moral qual- 
ity, but which have capacity for great good as well as for 
great evil. Sooner or later the individual must become 
aware of this, but his understanding does not come from 
being told, as so much information. It must rest rather 
on a cumulative experience of guided action and feeling. 
Our essential object should be to help the child into habits 

of using his impulses—all of them—for worthy ends. Sex 

education is thus a continuous process of emotional ad- 
justment in which explicit information plays an impor- 
tant but subordinate part. 


160 INTELLIGENT PARENTHOOD 


Cuarrman Myrick: ‘Sex Education in School—The 
Winnetka Plan,”’ is the subject of the talk by Mr. Wash- 
burne, Superintendent of the Winnetka Schools. 


SEX EDUCATION IN SCHOOL—THE 
WINNETKA PLAN 
Carleton Washburne, Superintendent of Schools, 
Winnetka, Illinois 

When Mrs. Gruenberg spoke of total ignorance of sex 
as being unattainable, she made a statement which is im- 
portant and true, and which answers many of the ques- 
tions as to whether we should have sex instruction. 

The question is not whether we should have sex in- 
struction. We are going to whether we want it or not. 
The question is, “Who shall give it?” 

Shall sex instruction be given in the home or in the 
school or on the street? Any question as to whether it 
shall be given at all is a purely theoretical one, and does 
not deal with the realm of facts. I do not believe that 
anyone would purposely advocate sex education on the 
street, yet those who oppose sex education in the school 
are to all intents and purposes advocating the worst type 
of sex education. 

The home, ideally, would be the place to give it, if we 
had mothers and fathers who from the beginning had the 
attitude toward sex that made it possible for them to 
speak of sex matters without self-consciousness, and with 
simplicity, and who had the knowledge to speak with 
scientific accuracy. As a matter of fact, however, it is 
clearly demonstrable that even in very select communities, 
even in communities which take schools, and children, and 
education very seriously indeed, over half of the children 


SEX EDUCATION 161 


reach adolescence without having had sex instruction from 
their homes, and that those children’ who have reached 
adolescence without sex instruction in their homes have, 
in the great majority of cases, received sex instruction of 
the wrong sort from their fellow pupils in the schools. 
This fact has been demonstrated every time, so far as I 
know, that anyone has attempted scientific investigation 
of the matter. 

Our questions are: “Can the instruction be given in 
the schools adequately and satisfactorily? Are the schools 
taking away something which the home should have? Is 
there any harm in talking to children in groups in the 
school, instead of talking to them at home alone?” 

Personally, I believe that so far as it is possible par- 
ents should give the sex instruction in the home right from 
the beginning. The first time a child asks a question about 
how babies come into the world, the child should have 
information. I believe that children should know about 
their own bodies, the bodies of their brothers and sisters, 
and should have frank, wholesome information from their 
parents ; the trouble is, most parents themselves were not 
taught that way. The parents are, in many, many cases, 
self-conscious in talking to their children. 

I knew of a man out in California, a very good friend 
of mine, who was arguing with me one day on this ques- 
tion. He said, “I have four boys. I have taught those boys 
the truth about sex from the beginning. And yet, just the 
other day I caught those little rascals out behind the barn 
talking about the calf that had just been born to the cow, 
and in whispers, as if they knew something naughty about 
it. I believe it is inherent in child nature to feel there is 


162 INTELLIGENT PARENTHOOD 


something hidden or secret in sex. I don’t believe you can 
get rid of it.” 

I said, “What is your own attitude toward sex?” He 
said, with a little embarrassment, “Well, I never think of 
the sex act without being ashamed.” 

Of course his children would reflect that point of 
view, however scientifically he had tried to give the facts 
to them. His subconscious attitude would stand out more 
clearly in the minds of these children than his conscious 
effort at scientific instruction. 

In Winnetka about six and a half years ago we began 
to put sex education into the schools. We put it in as a 
part of a course in biology. The course was elective; chil- 
dren did not need to take it if their parents did not wish. 
Most children very soon wanted to take the course. The 
children whose parents refused to allow them to take the 
course began taking the children who were taking it off to 
one side and getting their information second-hand. The 
children in the course started by thinking that everything 
about sex was perfectly natural. When they found, how- 
ever, that they had special knowledge that was kept secret 
from their fellows, the wholesomeness of their attitude 
was partly spoiled. After one year of making the course 
elective, we changed it to a required course. We felt the 
attitudes of the children not taking it were spoiling the 
attitudes of children taking it. 

Occasionally parents object. When they do, we say, 
“Come to us. If after a frank talk with us in the schools, 
you will agree to give the child full instruction at home to 
see that his mind is clean and straight in regard to sex 
matters, we will exempt your child.” I think that in the 


SEX EDUCATION _163 


six years we have had this instruction, we have had only 
about a dozen such requests. 

The great majority of parents who are too self-con- 
scious about sex to teach the children themselves, who, 
having the wrong attitude toward sex do not want it 
taught in the school, are a little ashamed to come in and 
talk it over with us, and tell us just why they do not want 
their child taught the truth. 

When a home teaches children frankly about sex, 
should those children have the course in school? Person- 
ally, I believe it is a good thing. 

I know that my own youngsters were taught to use 
the tooth brush at home, and until they went to school it 
was a struggle to get them to use it daily. When they got 
to school and the teachers began to emphasize the need of 
using the tooth brush, our children developed an ambi- 
tion to use it. There is a certain authoritativeness that 
comes from a source outside the home. 

You have heard about the boy who said, “Dad is 
Santa Claus, and the stork, too, and I am going to look 
into this Jesus Christ business.” Children sometimes get 
to feeling a certain lack of confidence in the instruction 
they are getting at home, and they need it buttressed by 
the more impersonal instruction given in the school. 

While I believe that sex instruction in the school is, 
in the present state of society, the only possible solution 
for the majority of children, I want to say very definitely 
that it is a dangerous thing unless you are dead sure that 
you have somebody who can do it competently. We hap- 
pen in Winnetka to have been very fortunate in the peo- 
ple who have handled this instruction, in Mr. Beatty and 
the various women. We have had people who can think 


164 INTELLIGENT PARENTHOOD 


about sex as a straightforward, natural, decent, scientific, 
and pure, and also beautiful thing. In any school where 
sex instruction is introduced, we must be sure that the. 
teachers have the right attitude. 

We must be sure that they are not going to conceal 
something, that they are going to tell everything that 
needs to be told, that they are not going to use innuendoes 
and implications and circumlocutions, but that each teach- 
er will tell honestly and frankly, and in straight, clear, 
simple language, every bit of the truth in regard to human 
reproduction. 

The moment that the teacher tries to hide the thing a 
little bit, the moment she does it all by analogy and talks 
about the plants and animals and says, ‘Now, in human 
beings it is much the same way,” the moment she refuses 
to give clear-cut, definite information in words a child can 
understand, that moment the teacher is tempting that 
child to use his imagination, to have curiosity, to get fur- 
ther information from somebody else, to ask an older child 
for that information. : 

The one thing we do not want is to stimulate curiosity 
about sex. We want to satisfy it completely and defi- 
nitely ; we want to let the child feel that from his teacher 
he can get better information than from any other source. 

The same thing is true, of course, of the education 
that should be given in the home. 

In Winnetka, for practical reasons, we do not begin 
sex instruction until the seventh grade. Where children 
are in need of instruction earlier we try to handle it 
through following up the individual cases. If a child 
moves out to Winnetka from Chicago or some other place, 
and has a lot of wrong information, and comes into one of 


SEX EDUCATION 165 


_our fourth or fifth grades, it is not long before we begin to 
find him a source of infection. We find the thing spread- 
ing out and we are very soon called in to try to stop it. 
We get hold of every child who has been infected, regard- 
less of his age, and we give him a perfectly straight, frank 
talk. We get rid of his curiosity and explain to him just as 
honestly as we know how what the whole thing is about, 
and why we don’t talk about it in public any more than 
we take baths in public. 

I often use this analogy in talking to a little child, 
around second or third grade, especially if he is a boy: 
“Now you like to cuddle with your mother, to kiss her, 
to sit in her lap. Yet you wouldn’t want to do it in front 
of the whole class of children. In the same way, you don’t 
say your prayers in the street. You do it privately in your 
own home. It is perfectly right to kiss your mother; it is 
right to say your prayers. But these things are not done 
in public. In the same way, we don’t talk in public about 
how babies come into the world. You can talk about it to 
your own mother and father, or to us, but not to other 
children. We want you to come to us. We will tell you 
everything you want to know. But do not talk about it 
with your playmates.” 

In some such way we expose the infection to sunlight 
and kill out the insidious germs that sometimes creep into 
the lower grades. | 

The problem of getting enough teachers of the right 
type has prevented our giving sex instruction lower than 
the seventh grade. Parents should begin the instruction as 
fully as they are able from the beginning. But even if you 
are sure your own child is getting the right instruction, 
you want to be sure the other children are not going to 


166 INTELLIGENT PARENTHOOD 


contaminate your child, and you want, therefore, to see 
that every child gets the right attitude toward sex. At 
present it is only through the schools that we can make 
right sex instruction universal. 


CuHarrMan Myrick: I think Mr. Beatty needs no in- 
troduction. He is the Assistant Superintendent of the 
Winnetka Schools, and he will speak on the “Method of 
Teaching.” 


METHOD OF TEACHING SEX 
Willard W. Beatty, Assistant Superintendent of Schools, 
Winnetka, Illinois 

The first and most important idea that is essential for 
a teacher of sex instruction in the schools, or in the home, 
or anywhere else to have is to realize that sex is a per- 
fectly normal function in life, and that there cannot be 
life without sex and that, therefore, there is nothing more 
strange or unusual or secret about sex than there is about 
eating or breathing or eliminating the waste products of 
the body. 

Sex has to be thought about as a perfectly normal ex- 
perience in the lives of all of us, and for that reason we 
believe that in starting such instruction in the schools, it 
is necessary first of all for our children to know just as 
much as they possibly can about life itself. We do not be- 
lieve that we can teach sex unless we teach it as a phase of 
living; therefore, our course in sex instruction, or our 
course which includes sex instruction, is a course in 
biology. 

We must frankly confess that we began teaching 


SEX EDUCATION 167 


biology primarily to get this matter of sex straight. There 
is no use dodging the question. That.is why we did it, but 
we came to the conclusion pretty early in the game that 
what I have just said held true, and that we had to teach 
life first. 

We started in by giving a course in sex instruction in 
twelve to eighteen meetings of a class; at the present time 
we are giving our biology course over a period of eighteen 
weeks, meeting five periods a week for thirty-five minutes, 
and the children ask for more time. It is one of the few 
courses in our schools where, as the course begins to draw 
toward its close, the children keep coming to the teacher 
and saying, ‘““Can’t we keep this up for a week or two, or 
three, or four weeks longer? There is so much more about 
ourselves that we wish to know,” and I do not know but 
what before we get through we will be taking a year to our 
instruction. Not instruction in sex, but instruction in the 
whole idea of life and living things. 

We begin our course with the simplest living organ- 
ism. We begin with the amoeba and bacteria, and other 
single-celled organisms and we attempt away down there 
in the simpler, living things to build up certain general 
ideas. We attempt to build up ideas about the process of 
a living thing acquiring food; about living things depend- 
ing on oxygen and carbon dioxide and other elements of 
the air in order that they have life; and about eliminating 
waste products and certain general ideas about the proc- 
ess of living things coming from other living things. Then 
we develop all of those ideas by illustrating their exist- 
ence, first in the small unicellular animals with asexual re- 
production and the very simplest processes of metabolism, 
on through the more complicated living forms in both the 


168 INTELLIGENT PARENTHOOD 


plant and animal kingdom; and as we build up through 
the plant and animal kingdom we bear in mind certain 
ideas. 

One such principle is that higher forms do not repro- 
duce nearly as profusely as the lower forms do. That is, 
the higher the animal structure, the fewer the eggs which 
are laid—from the fly which lays a few million eggs in a 
season up to the bird which lays from two to a dozen for 
her nesting. This decrease in number is possible because 
of the increasing care which the mother provides for her 
young, both prior to birth and for the period immediately 
following. 

Step by step we see this development: From simpler 
forms where large numbers of eggs are laid which are in 
turn fertilized outside of the body in many instances, so 
that chance may prevent fertilization entirely; through 
intermediate forms where a modified copulation takes 
place, as in the crayfish; to birds where the eggs are fer- 
tilized inside of the body, but are brought to maturity 
outside of the body; and lastly to where the eggs are fer- 
tilized inside of the body and complete their embryonic 
development inside of the mother. This general principle 
is stressed and illustrated repeatedly as we climb the lad- 
der of increasingly more complex living forms. The idea 
that the number of young decreases in proportion as the 
liability to fertilization, development, and maternal care 
increases is pretty clearly understood by the children be- 
fore we even approach a discussion of mammalia. 

The reason I stress that now is because through ex- 
perience we have discovered that certain things are true. 
One is that the greatest harm in this whole matter of sex 
instruction lies in the idea of sex coming ay a shock to the 


SEX EDUCATION 169 


child; where he discovers suddenly that something is true 
which he did not believe was true previously. 

A few years ago I had an instance that brought this 
very forcibly to my mind in one of the classes which I 
was instructing. We had been considering, I think, the 
chicken, and had talked about the actual method of fer- 
tilization of the hen’s eggs, just what the rooster did, and 
how it was done, and so forth. The next day we began 
talking about mammals and one of the boys asked the 
question whether much the same thing took place. I said, 
“Yes, we will discuss it more in detail later, but there has 
to be an actual, internal fertilization.” Whereupon, one 
of the boys in the-back of the room said, ‘That is all right, | 
but you can’t tell me my father and mother ever did any- 
thing like that.” 

That is the type of thing for which the home is re- 
sponsible. In other words there had been developed in that 
particular home the feeling that somehow or other any 
form of physical contact was more or less indecent and, 
therefore, when he began to think forward to a physical 
contact that was as intimate as the thing we were discuss- 
ing, the thing seemed impossible at the time. 

In that particular case we went to develop our gen- 
eral thesis with our illustrations and I was very pleased 
to notice that, as we completed the final discussion in 
this matter of human beings, the small boy was neither 
shocked nor surprised, nor still of the opinion that such 
things had not happened in his own home. 

I will tell you in just a moment how we develop right 
attitude, and I think you will see that his final reaction 
was a perfectly natural one, but there we had an illustra- 
tion of just exactly the thing Mrs. Gruenberg was speak- 


170 INTELLIGENT PARENTHOOD 


ing about, in that the home had developed an entirely 
artificial attitude so that the truth could not help but come 
as a shock. The first thing we have to do in our biology | 
classes is to overcome the attitude of mind which the 
silence, shame, false modesty, and wrong attitudes of the 
adult and child environment in which the child has been 
previously have put this whole question of sex. 

We, therefore, take a considerable time to build up a 
feeling of absolute confidence between the child and the 
teacher. The child must believe three or four things about 
the teacher: first of all, that the teacher is frank, that the 
teacher is outspoken, that the teacher is honest, and that 
there is going to be no beating around the bush; that if he 
asks a question, his question is going to get a perfectly 
frank, honest, careful consideration upon the part of the 
teacher, and it is going to be answered with the truth, the 
whole truth, and nothing but the truth. 

Children have been lied to about sex by their grown- 
ups and they know they have been lied to, and they come 
to the conclusion when they enter a class of this kind that 
the teacher is going to lie to them also, and the first thing 
we have to do is to convince them we are not. We must be 
honest with them at every turn, and we say constantly we 
will answer every question. We say, “We will answer 
every question that you ask as you go through the course. 
If you ask the question before you are ready for the ex- 
planation, we will make a record of that question and it 
will be taken up in due time,” and we abide by that prom- 
ise absolutely. : 

There is never a question which we refuse to answer. 
There are occasionally times when the question gets on 
matters of conduct where there are wide divergences of 


SEX EDUCATION 171 


opinion among the adult population, for instance, the mat- 
ter of birth control, and in cases of that kind we feel we 
have two obligations under the present state of society: 
one is to explain what the words mean—that intercourse 
without conception is possible, but that anything further 
than that must be carried back to the home for explana- 
tion. They have to take it home and get the final explana- 
tion of that situation, which brings out one other feature 
in this whole matter. 

We do not start any class in biology without having 
done two things. First of all, we have a general parent- 
teacher meeting the first part of the year in which I make 
perfectly clear and explicit in a statement what we are 
going to do. In addition to that I send a letter home to all 
the parents by mail in which, among other things that I 
stress in connection with our school work, I state what we 
are going to do, so that no parents can say we put any- 
thing over on them. They know what is being done, and 
in that letter and in that statement I request the parents 
to make every effort which they can to have the child 
bring home and talk over at home what has been going on 
in the class day by day, starting in with simpler forms of 
life and carrying on up to the final discussion of human 
reproduction. 

Then I stress, and my teachers stress with the chil- 
dren day by day, “Talk this over at home. Go home and 
get other ideas on the subject. Get an exchange of view- 
points in the home. Bring it back into the class and give it 
to us,” and increasingly as we are succeeding in educating 
our parents in Winnetka, they are co-operating with us. 

The first year or two that we tried this we almost 


172 INTELLIGENT PARENTHOOD 


gave some of the parents nervous prostration. They could 
not stand the strain; the children knew too much for them. 
But as the parents have come to discover that we mean © 
what we say and are going to do the job, they are begin- 
ning to get a bracer beforehand in the form of a certain 
amount of information themselves. This year I think a 
majority of our parents have encouraged confidence be- 
tween the children and themselves in the bringing home 
of this information, and there has been a much finer, much 
more intimate exchange of information, exchange of 
knowledge, and exchange of viewpoints between the par- 
ents and the children, which I think is a very vitally im- 
portant thing to have happen. 

In the actual matter of instruction, as Mr. Washburne 
said, we do not beat around the bush, and we answer 
every detail when we get to human reproduction that the 
child may want to know about—about the construction of 
his own body, about the construction of the organs of the 
other sex—and we go into specific detail with regard to 
the actual process of coition or sexual intercourse. We do 
not approach that bluntly without any preparation, but 
lay a foundation in idealism. 

We find that regardless of what the home contact of 
a child may be, if the actual idea of sexual intercourse is 
to be received by the child in the attitude of mind which 
we wish it to be received in, there must be a preparation 
on the part of the child’s mind for the facts as they are 
going to be presented. In order to give that presentation 
we have found that the best approach is by the parallel- 
ism of the personal contact, the caress, the kiss, the feel- 
ing of desire for contact with those whom we like or love, 


SEX EDUCATION 173 


and, conversely, the dislike for such personal contact upon 
the part of those whom we do not like, or do not care very 
much about. 

Almost every child (I think I could say every child 
quite safely) has felt the need of going to his mother or 
father when he was in pain, when he had been hurt, when 
he wanted sympathy, understanding, and help, and has 
sought personal contact, the personal caress, the kiss on 
the bump to make it well, or something of that kind. From 
that we lead him through a recognition of personal con- 
tact as an expression of the feeling of love and deep re- 
gard between two people to see the sexual relations as a 
culmination of that regard. Also, practically every child 
has an aunt or uncle, or somebody, who has wanted to kiss 
him and by whom he did not want to be kissed. There has 
been that very natural antipathy to being slobbered over 
by somebody, and there you have the beginning of your 
antipathy which it is necessary to establish if you are 
going to get the idea across that sexual intercourse should 
be limited to that person whom we are prepared to choose 
as a wife or a husband. 

You have to give the idea that it is through the most 
sincere, and deep, and fine expression of personal love be- 
tween two individuals that sexual experience is possible, 
and at the same time that it is a thing which cannot be tol- 
erated or conceived of by a clean-minded, high-idealed 
person, with one toward whom that feeling does not exist. 

Now that, in a nutshell, as far as one can express it 
in fifteen minutes, is what we are trying to do, and are 
doing. 


174 INTELLIGENT PARENTHOOD 


CuatrMAN Myrick: I wish now to introduce Dr. 
Rachelle Yarros, Director, Social Hygiene Council, of 
Chicago, who will speak on “Sex Education and Parents.” — 


SEX EDUCATION AND PARENTS 
Dr. Rachelle S. Yarros, Director, Social Hygiene Council, 
Chicago 

In the short time that is allotted to me, I can only 
emphasize further the need of sex social hygiene educa- 
tion, especially among parents, and briefly touch on the 
important points that must be presented to them. In my 
experience, although it may seem strange to some of you, 
it is comparatively easy to give to children the elementary 
knowledge of sex and reproduction. Of course, the earlier 
one begins, the more naturally these facts are received 
and registered with other facts on the comparatively clean 
slate of the child’s mind. The longer we withhold this 
knowledge, the more difficult it becomes to impart it. The 
child is bound to pick up information from an environ- 
ment which is surcharged with sex. At home and in their 
other surroundings, half-truths flavored with all kinds of 
notions, some vulgar and obscene, impress themselves 
upon the fertile mind of the child. Then, during the ado- 
lescent period with its conscious awakening of sex, be- 
wilderment increases, adding fears, doubts, and confusion, 
thus complicating our problem. Even then, however, it is 
not as difficult as we are led to believe to give children the 
necessary sex information, because at this time there is a 
specially keen desire for knowledge concerning the body 
and its functions, and there is still great trust in the supe- 
rior knowledge of the older generation. Moreover, because 
of the vivid imagination of adolescents, we should be able 
to guide them toward clearer thinking and finer attitudes. 


SEX EDUCATION 175 


The situation is entirely different when we try to 
educate parents. By the time people have reached that 
stage, they have already accumulated all kinds of false 
notions and traditions and their attitudes toward sex 
problems have become quite fixed. 

The father, for example, has learned about sex from 
all sorts of sources, mostly undesirable ones. His sex 
knowledge is tinged for the most part with obscenity and 
vuigarity. In his struggle with sex appetite and its satis- 
faction, he has frequently made compromises which he 
later tries to rationalize. And when love, courtship, mar- 
riage and family life bring him the higher sex satisfac- 
tions, he still remains exceedingly tolerant of the sex com- 
promises of his youth. In fact, in most cases he remains 
firmly convinced that compromises are essential in the sex 
life of man. 

As for the mother of the family, it is much more diffi- 
cult to know what sex attitudes she brings because of her 
traditional upbringing, with its fear of sex and complete 
suppression of sex knowledge on the one hand, and on the 
other, because her whole life as a girl was directed and 
centered on using her sex with the ultimate object of ac- 
quiring a husband and family. 

Sex education for parents, therefore, is a much more 
comprehensive task. To correct their distorted notions 
and to arouse their sincere interest in what they can do for 
the children, one must cover most of the phases of what we 
call social hygiene as well as of sex education proper. It 
is essential for them to know the dangerous prevalence of 
venereal diseases and how these diseases affect the indi- 
vidual, the home, and the child. They must realize the 


176 INTELLIGENT PARENTHOOD 


importance of early diagnosis and effective treatment of 
venereal diseases. Such knowledge is particularly im- 
portant because of the danger of transmitting such dis-. 
eases to offspring, thus starting them with severe handi- 
caps in the struggle for life. 

It is essential for parents to know that silence and 
ignorance on the subject of sex is believed to be the under- 
lying cause for the prevalence of prostitution, that prosti- 
tution is the largest contributing cause of venereal disease. 
Although prostitution is an ancient evil which perplexed 
the wisest minds of the past, yet in the last twenty-five 
years medical, psychological, and social facts have been 
brought to light which have produced profound changes 
in scientific and enlightened opinion in respect to the 
problem. In fact, the consensus of opinion in this coun- 
try and in Europe is now that commercialized vice can and 
must be eradicated, and that segregation and examina- 
tion only serve to give false security in sanctioning pros- 
titution. 

We must also present to parents the problem of sex 
delinquency with its underlying causes, economic, educa- 
tional, psychological, social, and mental. All the medical 
and social protective measures designed to clear up en- 
vironmental conditions must be discussed with parents 
because no amount of education of children would be of 
any value in an environment of disease and social menace. 

As to sex education, it is necessary to distinguish be- 
tween knowledge of sex and reproduction, and the incul- 
cation of higher sex ideals. Since the preschool age is ad- 
mitted to be of great importance for starting the develop- 
ment of the child in the right direction, we must not fail 
to impress parents with the necessity of conveying simple 


SEX EDUCATION 177 


scientific facts of reproduction to the child at that period, 
without fear of awakening prematurely the sex instinct. 
It is essential for the child to know that all living beings 
reproduce and that father and mother give part of them- 
selves to make up the new life of the baby. The attention 
of the child should be deliberately called to the fact that 
all living things come either from seeds or eggs, and the 
processes of reproduction in flowers and in domestic ani- 
mals should be explained. Children must learn that there 
is a differentiation in sex. They should learn to know 
early the bodily differences between boys and girls. A 
distinct effort should be made by parents to make the chil- 
dren understand these differences, for otherwise, an ex- 
cessive and morbid curiosity is bound to develop. Again, 
we must make the greatest effort to teach parents how to 
convey to children in a simple but direct manner the proc- 
ess of mating and birth in the human species. First, be- 
cause both among boys and girls, one finds a tremendous 
curiosity on the subject, out of all due proportion. In the 
second place, parents seem to experience the greatest 
difficulty in plainly stating these facts to their children. 
Indeed, they are almost paralyzed by fear when it is sug- 
gested that this must be done. We must make every effort 
to rid them of this unwarranted fear. 

With the right kind of early preparation, it becomes 
much easier for parents to guide the child’s knowledge 
during the adolescent period when it becomes necessary 
to discuss very frankly the physiological as well as the 
psychological changes that are about to take place at 
puberty. The girl must learn more about her reproductive 
organs, about ovulation and about menstruation. The boy 
must learn about the testicles and the testicular secretions 


178 INTELLIGENT PARENTHOOD 


and what these physiological changes signify. They must 
come to see clearly that, although from a biological or ani- 
mal viewpoint maturing means readiness to mate and re- 
produce, yet the human being has evolved so far from the 
animal that these manifestations are only indications that 
the boy is beginning to change into a man and the girl into 
a woman, and that for their complete development they 
need ten more years with every opportunity for physical, 
mental, and emotional growth. 

We now come to the more difficult phase of sex edu- 
cation, and that is the inculcation of higher ideals and sex 
standards. This belongs to the realm of character-train- 
ing, which does not depend so much on knowledge as on 
environment and the attitudes of those who surround the 
child from the time it is born. Here, again, we have great 
difficulty largely because our own attitudes and behavior 
in sex and related matters are in a state of extreme con- 
fusion. We must, however, in every way possible, through 
our own behavior, through literature and environment 
convey to the growing child that the important instinctive 
impulses should not be feared or suppressed but modified 
in accordance with the requirements of the highest happi- 
ness to the individual that is consistent with social good. 
The question of proper sublimation of the sex energy dur- 
ing adolescence is very important and such sublimation 
depends a great deal on the tastes in art, literature, and 
the humanities that we develop in the child and on the 
possibilities afforded for satisfying these tastes. Be- 
havior in sex, like other behavior, depends largely on the 
ideals and standards that we have developed and on the 
control that we have over our appetites. We must keep 
completely absorbed in healthy and useful work receiving 
satisfaction from the things we do, while planning and 


SEX EDUCATION 179 


dreaming of the future. Character-building and idealism 
require much thought and care from the parents, the 
school, and the community. Are they willing and really 
anxious to do their part? With a finer relationship be- 
tween the parents, the home should survive not only be- 
cause of the part it plays in the protection of children, as 
in the past, but because of the progressive changes it 
is undergoing—greater freedom, better opportunities for 
the development of the children, understanding, sympa- 
thy, and higher idealism in the place of mere parental 
authority. 

Mr. Beatty: I have been asked one question which 
I think may be of interest to all of you. 

Whether or not we segregate the boys and girls in 
Winnetka in giving this instruction. The answer is, yes, 
we do. I can also add to this the statement that I, person- 
ally, do not think it is necessary to do so, but many par- 
ents believe that it is the necessary thing to do. We have 
a means of doing it very inconspicuously so that the chil- 
dren are not conscious of being separated because of sex. 
I think it would be exceedingly harmful if the children 
realized that they were being separated for this particular 
instruction. 

They are not separated for this instruction, they are 
separated for something else where they consciously real- 
ize that the separation is desirable. We take those who 
do not go to the playground, where we have organized 
games of a type for the girls the boys would not play, and 
a type for the boys the girls could not play. 

Voice: Isn’t the seventh grade rather late? 

Mr. Beatty: I would say put it down into the fourth 
or fifth, if we had the means of doing it. 


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PROBLEMS OF THE ADOLESCENT— 
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THE IMPERATIVE AIMS IN ADOLESCENT 
TRAINING 
William H. Burnham, Professor of Education and 
Social Hygiene, Clark University 

In the development of the human individual there 
comes a time “when the golden gates of childhood are for- 
ever passed” and the youth enters on the new life of ado- 
lescence. This is a focal point in education, because it is a 
focal point in development. 

The characteristics of this period have been made 
familiar by many writers since the classic work on ado- 
lescence by G. Stanley Hall. We have at this period a 
great influx of energy appearing in both physical and 
mental phenomena: a spurt of growth at the beginning, 
development of the heart and other organs, readjustment 
of the endocrine functions, reinforcement of the body 
against chronic disease; on the mental side new interests, 
new ambitions, new zest to meet life with its stern real- 
ities, and a new birth in relation to society. 

Again we have the appearance of hereditary forces. 
Injurious tendencies and an unfortunate heredity are like- 
ly to manifest themselves; while on the other hand, good 
stock and healthful strains appear as a background and 
defense of the individual in the adverse conditions of a 
threatening environment. 

It is a period also of relative instability ; old forms of 
reaction, old habits, are disturbed or broken up, new forms 
of behavior developed. All kinds of aberrations and per- 
versities may appear. Susceptibility to acute disease 


183 


184. INTELLIGENT PARENTHOOD 


seems increased; many disorders incident to development 
occur, but are likely to be outgrown with proper en- 
vironment. 

Again adolescence is the period of mental and moral 
variation and development. The reformers in the church, 
in the state, in education and industry, are young men 
and young women. Then for a time the individual shakes 
off the fetters of convention and inertia; the possibility of 
discoveries and new activities for a time exists. It is sur- 
prising how largely the world’s progress has been due to 
adolescent ideals and performance. In human life and 
society the youth movement is the oldest movement in the 
world. To give opportunity for adolescent initiative is the 
greatest accomplishment of intelligent education. 

The problem then is to adapt education at this period 
to an individual with such characteristics. These great 
impulses and tendencies, with all they involve, should be 
considered in determining the training of youth. A few 
aims are vitally imperative. Like everything else of supe- 
rior importance, in outline they are simple, although in 
practical accomplishment infinitely complex and difficult. 
The following are some of them. 


SELF-DISCOVERY 


The first imperative aim of adolescent education is the 
opportunity for self-discovery, and to this end an intro- 
duction to many different activities and to many different 
interests. Sooner or later the more intelligent adolescent 
begins to philosophize. He meets the great problems that 
have confronted youth in all ages from Gautama and 
Socrates to the present. He reflects on the causes and pos- 
sibilities of existence, is convinced perhaps by the argu- 


PROBLEMS OF THE ADOLESCENT 185 


ments of the sophist Gorgias that nothing exists, that if it 
did exist we could not know it, that if we did know it, we 
could not tell it to anyone else; nevertheless he finds him- 
self unable to escape the stupendous fact of his own per- 
sonal existence. Before this fact he stands amazed, at 
once humbled and exalted; he studies science, and finds 
that on the basis of chance it would be perhaps one in 
many billion that he himself as an individual personality 
should be living here and now; and it may be that he feels 
in himself the opportunity and privilege of all the ages. 
How could it be otherwise than that he should wish to 
learn about himself, his own abilities, his potentialities, 
his powers, his connection with the world about him, his 
relation to his companions, his possible function and work. 

Whether inclined to philosophy or to action, the youth 
desires to find out the facts about himself. No wonder the 
Greeks emphasized self-knowledge as the acme of wisdom 
and made gnothi se auton the fundamental maxim of their 
mental hygiene. To do anything else as soon as youth be- 
gin to study this problem, any attempt to evade it, to 
camouflage it, to postpone it, would be at the outset a blow 
against the integrity of the personality, a suggestion to 
the youth to dodge reality, to be dishonest with one’s own 
self from the outset. Whether or not we give opportunity 
for self-discovery, youth will make it; but they may 
fail to discover their own higher powers, their special 
capacities. 


INTEGRATION OF THE PERSONALITY 


Among their discoveries is likely to be the amazing 
fact of one’s own integrated personality. This suggests 
the second imperative aim of adolescent training. The aim 


186 INTELLIGENT PARENTHOOD 


should be to preserve at all cost the integrity of the ado- 
lescent’s personality and to develop this healthfully at 
higher and higher levels. The psychology of integration is 
simple, but difficult to apply. As Sherrington, the great 
neurologist, and Mme Montessori alike have pointed out, 
the acme of integration is found in the mental process of 
concentrated attention. As Royce long ago pointed out, 
from the genetic point of view attention is a reaction of 
the whole organism comparable to the tropisms in plants 
and animals. In children, while doing their own tasks, 
Montessori has noted the way a kind of polarization of at- 
tention occurs, which has a steadying, calming, integrat- 
ing effect. It is the same in the adolescent. Concentrated 
attention is temporary integration; much training in this 
is needed by the adolescent. This is the true safeguard of 
the personality, this the kind of defense needed. 

But this leaves the matter all in the air. How shall 
we bring about this training of attention? If the adoles- 
cent is given a fairly rich environment and a reasonable 
amount of freedom, he is apt to make another marvelous 
discovery sooner or later, namely, that he can do some- 
thing really worth while. Each of you perhaps can re- 
member when you first made this discovery, that you 
could do some one thing really well, and how it acted as a 
stimulus and an inspiration to you thereafter. This in- 
sight into one’s own capacity is likely to become more 
than an incentive, often a driving force and to transform 
the character of the individual. 


A WORTH-WHILE TASk 


This leads us to the third imperative aim, a signifi- 
cant task. Since the great means of integrating an indi- 


PROBLEMS OF THE ADOLESCENT 187 


vidual’s personality is the doing of a worth-while task, 
every adolescent, like every genius, should sooner or later 
have some great all-absorbing task which will unify the 
many otherwise discordant new interests and activities of 
the youth. A worth-while task of one’s own choosing every 
adolescent desires. It is youth’s legitimate right. 

The adolescent usually discovers not only that he has 
some special ability and can really do something himself 
as a significant part of the world’s work, but also he dis- 
covers that he is weak or defective in certain directions, 
that in certain things he is apt to fail, and that in many 
things he cannot do as well as others. From this experience 
of failure may come a wholesome humility and modesty 
and the stimulus to more careful and more industrious ef- 
fort. Frequently, however, such failures of the individual 
develop a sense of inferiority which inhibits further en- 
deavor. 


SIGNIFICANT ACCOMPLISHMENT 


Thus the fourth imperative aim is significant accom- 
plishment. For this end the stimulus of success is neces- 
sary. Successful accomplishment gives a stimulus that 
few can do without. Think, for example, of your own ex- 
perience. From definite success in something, you have de- 
veloped the habit of success. On the other hand continued 
failure, as many know from personal experience, not only 
depresses, tends to develop a sense of inferiority, and _ 
paralyzes endeavor, but the habit may develop, and this . 
again may transfer to other forms of activity, until in 
everything the individual seems handicapped and doomed 
to failure. | 

. Right here in this experience of success or failure, the 


188 INTELLIGENT PARENTHOOD 


individual learns the truth about himself and should learn 
to face reality in regard to his own powers and his own 
achievements. One who does this will find the possibility 
always of worth-while activity, although the achievement 
of certain ends may be beyond the individual's powers. 
But those who faithfully perform their tasks, even if 
doomed to be heroes of defeat, will find the fight worth 
making for itself, whether victory or failure be the result. 
But usually the aim of teachers should be to give the 
stimulus of success; and it is, we may say, the duty of 
every teacher at some time, in some way, in some subject, 
to give every adolescent the stimulating experience of a 
significant success. 


THE DEVELOPMENT OF SOCIAL INTERESTS 


The fifth aim is the development of social interests. 
Since, as Rousseau long ago pointed out, at adolescence 
the individual has a new birth in relation to society, it be- 
comes desirable to develop right social attitudes, and in- 
terests in great social movements, such as the interest in 
organized philanthropy, positive effort for hygiene, public 
welfare, and the like. This affords opportunity for mani- 
fold significant tasks, and there is likely to be no lack of 
activity in such movements, provided permanent interests 
are developed. 


SOCIAL SUCCESS 


Finally is the imperative aim of social success. The 
individual adolescent desires to do something really sig- 
nificant in the social groups of which he is a member. If 
he acquires the ability to render a significant service, that 
gives a reward to which no other is comparable. Every 


PROBLEMS OF THE ADOLESCENT 189 


youth desires such opportunity, and nothing is more 
tragic, nothing perhaps more menacing to the mental 
health than lack of opportunity and lack of ability to 
achieve social success. 

Every boy and girl should be trained to such supe- 
riority in something that each will be able to render a dis- 
tinct service in some social group and thus to receive the 
stimulus that comes from success. This development of 
superiority in each child is the aim of democratic educa- 
tion, the ideal in its higher form so far as the individual is 
concerned—a stupendous vagary, some will say, but pre- 
cisely such was the lower form of this ideal when it de- 
manded that every boy and girl should have the opportu- 
nity to learn to read and write. Thus our final aim in- 
volves actual social training in real democratic groups, an 
aim that should be made universal in American schools, 
involving a form of training absolutely essential for the 
permanent development of democracy. 

The great objective of the democratic ideal is actual 
training in real democratic groups, where each child, in 
Pasteur’s phrase, has the opportunity for individual ini- 
tiative for the common welfare, where the leader does not 
dominate the group, but the different superiorities of the 
members of the group are integrated for a common pur- 
pose by the leader. 

The aristocratic ideal tells us that education should 
be controlled by the superior wisdom of the social group. 
To this we all agree. More concretely, it tells us that the 
superior men of the state should control education. This 
is a more difficult proposition. Who is the superior man? 
Ludovici or his Alpine guide? It is hard to find him. Of 
course, you may explain and make the necessary modifi- 


190 INTELLIGENT PARENTHOOD 


cations, but as soon as you hedge and begin to do this, 
what becomes of your all-around superior man? 

Teachers, we may naturally expect from their daily 
acquaintance with pupils, may be able to pick out the su- 
perior; but teachers, Terman tells us, do not know the 
superior children when they see them. Parents perhaps do 
better, for they are apt to look upon their own children as 
superior; and Spearman tells us every child is a genius in 
embryo; and the great teachers have been wont to take 
this position. To find the superior man, however, is diffi- 
cult; and yet the superior wisdom of the group may be 
found in the integrated superiorities of all the different 
members. 

Perhaps we shall find that the management of a so- 
cial group by the integrated superiority of all the members 
of the group is the only means of realizing Emerson's 
ideal of direction of the group by the superior intelligence 
of “masters instructed in all the great arts of life.” Such 
management is possible, and represents the natural recon- 
ciliation of the age-long conflict between aristocracy and 
democracy. It represents at once a democratic aristocracy 
and an aristocratic democracy. 

Such are some of the overlapping aims of adolescent 
training. Let me repeat, and then we may consider them 
in relation to practice. 

(1) Self-discovery, and for that end an introduction 
to many activities. (2) Integration of the personality, 
and to that end training of attention. (3) The doing of a 
worth-while task, and for that end a maximum of freedom. 
(4) Significant accomplishment, and for that end the 
habit of success. (5) The development of the wider social 
virtues, and for that end the development of interest in 


PROBLEMS OF THE ADOLESCENT 191 


various forms of social welfare. (6) Social success, and 
for that end the development of such superiority in some- 
thing that one may render a distinct social service. 

‘These are very simple things, very obvious, very 
familiar perhaps to most of you, in large part an old story. 
All of us perhaps will agree to them. Clearly then the 
thing to do is to regard them in practice. What do we 
actually do? 

We say the aim of adolescent training should be self- 
discovery, but we insist on training in a few conventional 
things of a narrow curriculum with little opportunity for 
self-discovery. We demand training in concentrated at- 
tention, in the doing of a significant task freely chosen, 
then we permit many forms of distraction and disintegra- 
tion, and impose our own tasks instead of granting that 
freedom of choice which makes one feel responsible for it 
as really one’s own. 

We recognize the need of the stimulus of success, and 
yet we have provided a dozen conditions and methods in 
the schools that prevent marked success for from 25 to 50 
per cent of the pupils. We see the importance of social 
as well as individual success and the need of social train- 
ing in really democratic groups, and we proceed to domi- 
nate the group by our own ideas and methods, or perhaps 
choose student leaders, courteous and benevolent leaders, 
but who nevertheless dominate the group and often rob 
the individual members of the opportunity for initiative 
and real group activity. 

Again in the inevitable conflicts between the new and 
the old, between ancient good and the newer and higher 
good, between old doctrines and new truth, more con- 
cretely perhaps between the traditions and beliefs of our 


192 INTELLIGENT PARENTHOOD 


fathers and the demonstrated truths of science today, in 
these sometimes heartbreaking conflicts, we recognize the 
need of solving the problem, not by repression of one side 
and the dominance of the other, but by integration at a 
higher level, and yet we proceed with the same old dog- 
matism, and arouse the same inevitable conflict between 
the eternal youth movement and the fossilized dogmas and 
prejudices of an obsolete past. 

We all accept as the merest axiom and platitude that 
it is only by self-activity, the youth’s own doing and think- 
ing, that training comes; and yet in the schools and in the 
homes by a score of subtle methods we proceed to rob the 
youth of their own legitimate tasks. 

Two things at least should be obvious. First of all, 
the adolescent period of education is not a time for stand- 
ardization. Whatever may be said for the standardized 
work advocated by H. G. Wells in the elementary schools, 
it is quite out of place in the secondary and higher schools. 
Now, if ever, is the time when opportunity should be given 
boys and girls for thinking their own thoughts and doing 
their own tasks. Mr. Wells, in his own character, fur- 
nishes, I think, all the illustration we need. Wells appar- 
ently is himself an example of permanent adolescence, an 
example of youth not only with many of its defects, but 
with a permanent vitality and youthfulness. 

As expressed by a recent critic, Mr. Church, the main- 
spring of Wells’ being is an enormous emotional energy. 
Displeasing, even disgusting to some, but with an enor- 
mous fruitfulness characterized, however, by a sort of 
adolescent shamelessness that saps all the insular and 
starchy dignity out of his character making him springy 
and volatile, a sort of Olympian. 


PROBLEMS OF THE ADOLESCENT 193 


Wells, like a typical adolescent, first acts and then 
thinks. His writing is suffused by a vital spirit, ever 
changing, ever new, ever creative. For such a character a 
standardized education is obviously out of the question. 

Second, we should aim at least to understand our ado- 
lescent boys and girls. When the adolescent discovers the 
self, naturally he becomes very sensitive in regard to it 
and devises perhaps many defense mechanisms to protect 
it from anything that remotely threatens its integrity. If 
perchance on account of failure of adverse conditions, a 
sense of inferiority is developed, then the youth is apt to 
resort to some means of compensation to atone for defi- 
ciency and defect. But whatever the condition, the youth, 
boy or girl, is likely to become extremely sensitive, sub- 
ject to strong emotion, but especially anxious to be un- 
derstood. ) 

The adolescent period has been frequently referred to 
as the nascent period for emotion. This is true, but it is 
also a period of great reserve. The youth has ideals, as- 
pirations, and feelings that are too sacred to be discussed. 
This may be especially in regard to one’s aspirations in 
life—such matters as choice of a calling, the choice of a 
political party, the love affairs of the adolescent, and, 
most of all perhaps, in matters of religion. Adults some- 
times outrage this reserve in regard to the most sacred 
things. 

Thus one of the important hygienic needs in connec- 
tion with these aims is a sympathetic understanding. This 
can hardly be put too strongly; but to give this sympa- 
thetic understanding, one needs not merely sympathy and 
good will but also a knowledge of adolescent development, 
that interest in adolescence that means prevision for the 


194 INTELLIGENT PARENTHOOD 


developments, normal and abnormal, likely to come. God- 
dard has suggested the vast number of conduct disorders 
and crimes that would be prevented by means of right 
understanding. 

Our courts are picking up many thousands of delin- 
quent boys and girls every year. A very small percentage 
of them ever are restored so as to contribute their share to 
the general welfare. The most of them are always a 
burden and many of them become our most dangerous 
criminals. 

Why is this so? 

Because we have made no effort to understand the 
children. 


To the insistent question “What shall be done for the 
individual adolescents who face such glorious opportu- 
nities, are threatened by such serious dangers?” the an- 
swer in detail for concrete cases is vastly complex and 
puzzling, but the general answer for all cases is simple. 
What is needed is the help of the well-established teach- 
ings of mental hygiene and training in habits of mental 
health. 

We may sum up the whole matter of the aims and 
problems of mental hygiene and education at adolescence 
in perhaps a dozen keywords. Some of these are the fol- 
lowing: freedom, opportunity, self-discovery, self-asser- 
tion, self-expression, self-realization, a significant task, 
individual and social success, integration of the personal- 
ity, removal of mental conflicts, not by repression of one 
but by higher integration of the conflicting ideals, and the 
democratic ideal in its higher form. 

And as a most important practical aim throughout, 
sympathetic understanding. Spranger is right. The ado- 
lescent yearns to be understood. The business of educa- 
tion is to understand. 


CONFRONTING THE WORLD—THE 
ADJUSTMENTS OF LATER 
ADOLESCENCE? 

Dr. Frankwood E. Williams, Medical Director, 
National Committee for Mental Hygiene 

I have two points that I wish to make. I hesitate to 
discuss them, however, because each would seem to me so 
obvious that I feel I run the risk of being boresome. How- 
ever, though they would seem to be obvious, like most ob- 
vious things, they have been overlooked almost entirely 
in our thinking and discussion of the subject; and because 
they have been so lost sight of, secondary problems have 
arisen to occupy our attention. These have aroused con- 
siderable heated discussion as there are many differences 
of opinion about some of them, and I risk being seriously 
misunderstood through having the obvious points I wish 
to make caught up and lost in the emotions aroused by 
secondary issues. However, the topic is quite too impor- 
tant for one to hesitate for either of these reasons to dis- 
cuss it frankly. 

It seems to me that the adolescent, getting ready to 
face the world, has two major problems before him. We 
give him innumerable problems, from learning how to 
dress neatly and speak correctly to passing the college- 
entrance examinations. We place great emphasis upon all 
of these and a host of other problems. However, if we will 
strip away what is artificial and what is important merely 


* Copyright, 1926, by the New Republic, Inc.; reprinted with 
permission. 


195 


196 INTELLIGENT PARENTHOOD 


because we make it important—and the importance of 
things is, after all, relative—we get to two issues which 
face every adolescent boy and girl and upon the solution © 
of which depends entirely the success of their future lives. 

These two problems are, first, emancipation from the 
home, and, second, the establishment of heterosexuality. 
Everything in the future depends upon the success of the 
boy or girl in solving these two problems. 

In spite of the absolute, fundamental, and primary 
importance of these two things, the home, the school, and 
our social life generally seem to be almost entirely organ- 
ized and banded together to defeat, in so far as they can, 
the establishment of these two things. 

In this adolescent boy who until recently has been, on 
the whole, a dutiful, gentle, lovely child, parents note with 
fear and anxiety changes that are taking place. There are 
his increasing gruffness; his lack of consideration for oth- 
ers, particularly those of whom he has been especially 
considerate before, his mother for instance; the roughen- 
ing of his language through the bringing in of slang and 
sometimes terms that are even more disliked than slang; 
his increasing intolerance of other children, particularly 
the younger children in the family; his increasing secre- 
tiveness. He is not so open-hearted as he was before; he 
does not confide as he did before; he keeps more to him- 
self, and one is not sure of what is going on in his mind. 
This makes the mother very anxious. 

He is less given to demonstrations of affection; he is 
inclined to resist advice and to scoff at sentiment; he shows 
a tendency toward bizarre methods of dressing, either in 
the way of wearing old, disgraceful clothing, or at other 
times of being decidedly over-particular and dandified in 


PROBLEMS OF THE ADOLESCENT 197 


his dressing ; he demands more and more money; he is in- 
creasingly reckless and rude. ; 

_ These are things that parents note, as their children 
enter adolescence, and become much alarmed. But in real- 
ity the general tendency indicated by all of these things 
is healthy, although the particular forms or aspects it may 
take may not necessarily be healthy and certainly are 
sometimes unwise; the tendency, which is the beginning 
effort on the part of the child to emancipate himself from 
home, is healthy. 

If this tendency does not manifest itself, then indeed 
parents should become concerned. At the present time, 
however, if the child goes docilely through his adolescence, 
still childishly dependent upon his mother, if he is obedi- 
ent and never gives a moment’s trouble or care, if he has 
his arm simply covered with insignia of approval for good 
deeds, then the parents are happy and pleased. Then, fre- 
quently, they might better be thoroughly alarmed—clear 
to the end of their toes. 

As it is, if the boy does begin to show some of these 
emancipating tendencies, the parents become anxious. As 
I have noted, any of these reactions may cease to be 
healthy in itself, may be developed to a degree where it no 
longer represents a healthy reaction, but an unhealthy 
overcompensation ; but if so, this undesirable overcompen- 
sation is due not to moral depravity or “original sin,” but 
to the resistance to the original healthy tendency that has 
been met with by the child. These three things should be 
kept clearly in mind—the underlying tendency, which is 
sound and healthy; the manifestations of this tendency, 
which bear the same relationship to the tendency as do 
symptoms to a disease, which may be annoying and dis- 


198 INTELLIGENT PARENTHOOD 


tressing, but which never have the same relative impor- 
tance as the thing itself; and finally, the secondary reac- 
tions which may be even more annoying and distressing 
and even dangerous, but which are produced by ignoring 
the real situation and attempting to deal with the symp- 
toms of the situation. 

If to the first feeble efforts of the child to emancipate 
himself, resistance is raised, a child who is healthy men- 
tally and physically will make yet another and a more vig- 
orous attempt to accomplish his objective. His own resist- 
ance will increase as the resistance he has to meet in- 
creases. Misunderstanding and anger—and heart-ache— 
enter. If the resistance mount to the point where the con- 
test becomes vulgarized into a pushing and shoving con- 
test, there is likely to be produced, because of the misun- 
derstanding of the real significance of what is taking place 
and the consequent unwise resistance on the part of par- 
ents, a whole host of secondary reactions which are neces- 
sary for the child under the circumstances, but which are 
probably not nearly so healthy as were the first. The 
whole issue becomes confused. The parents are fearful 
and anxious. They had hoped to raise a gentleman and a 
scholar and they have a roughneck. The boy is angry and 
rebellious, also puzzled and hurt. Confusion is worse con- 
founded, frequently at this point, by a further unwise 
action on the part of parents. With a lack of logic un- 
worthy of a school ‘child—and the point is not missed by 
the adolescent boy or girl—they demand love in payment 
for sacrifices that have grown out of responsibilities they 
themselves assumed voluntarily and for their own pleas- 
ure, and they demand respect as though that were a right 
that came with accidental parenthood. There is something 


PROBLEMS OF THE ADOLESCENT 199 


ludicrous and pathetic in an angry woman, whether wife 
or mother, demanding love, and something pathetic and 
comic in a childishly angry man, who has lost mastery of 
himself and of a situation, demanding respect. These 
things are not had by right. 

Parents need not be fearful of losing the love of their 
children. If they would only understand that the love 
which the children have for them is quite a fundamental 
thing ; that it is almost impossible to eradicate, even if one 
wished to do so; that there is no desire on the part of the 
child, in spite of his symptoms, to deny this love or to get 
away from it completely, they would be less anxious and 
their emotions would less frequently plunge them into 
mistakes at critical moments. But they don’t seem to know 
this. They take these symptomatic manifestations as real 
and are fearful. They can drive away the love the child 
has for them or they can change it into something quite 
different and harmful—but they cannot lose it. 

Children do love their parents, often even when their 
parents are cruel and unworthy, and when any under- 
standing at all or intelligence has been shown they respect 
them. But neither this love nor this respect should be kept 
on a childhood plane. Although he may not know it, it is 
against these bonds that the adolescent is struggling. It is 
a vital matter for him and if it becomes necessary he is 
quite right in putting up a vigorous resistance. Freeing 
himself from bonds which can only be a handicap in the 
period of his life he is now entering does not imply any 
real lack of respect for father or of genuine affection for 
mother. It is merely that these emotions must now be 
brought to function at an adult level. The child must come 
into control of his own emotional forces. 


200 INTELLIGENT PARENTHOOD 


This process is as necessary as learning to walk and 
difficulties and dangers are involved. We do not, however, 
prevent the child from learning to walk for fear it will 
fall in the fire or down the stairs. First shielding it from 
the fire and the stairs, we encourage, urge, and guide it. 
At first it may look as if learning to walk as an adolescent 
involved greater danger than learning to walk as an in- 
fant. Learning to walk involves the possibility of death 
or of serious permanent crippling. This is not so true in 
adolescence though it may appear even more so. These 
possibilities are at times involved, but if parents will ex- 
amine closely those activities on the part of adolescents 
which give them such great concern, they will find, I think, 
that seldom is either of these dangers involved. At most 
what is involved—and it is this that is the real cause of 
the concern, although the parents may not be aware of it 
—is the possible embarrassment and “disgrace” to them- 
selves growing out of these activities rather than any very 
great likelihood of serious danger to the child. At least 
this is clear—whatever the danger, whether to parent or 
child, the danger in the opposite direction, so far as the 
child is concerned, is surer and greater. 

If this emancipation is resisted unwisely consequences 
follow. Either the child gives up in his attempt—and if so 
he is lost—or, failing in complete accomplishment, he 
meets the issue by an unhealthy overcompensation and 
cripples himself seriously—or he succeeds. 

If the child is successful, his self-respect and confi- 
dence are increased and, once the freedom is gained, what- 
ever has been fundamental in the bond of affection re- 
mains and is healthful and helpful and upon a stable and 
abiding basis. It may no longer be expressed in the old 


PROBLEMS OF THE ADOLESCENT 201 


ways, as it should not be, but it does find healthful and 
worth-while ways of expressing itself. 

Discipline can come only from leadership. Surely in 
all other affairs, aside from parental matters, we are see- 
ing this. We no longer believe merely because somebody 
puts himself over us or, by some fortuitous circumstances 
is put over us, that we need to abide by his discipline. We 
follow, as adults in the community, those individuals who 
inspire our confidence and our desire to follow them by 
their worthiness of leadership. That is really the only 
kind of discipline that counts, whether it is in a business 
organization or a military organization or any other kind 
of an organization. You can make people goosestep and 
march if you wish to use a discipline of force. You can 
gain your objective temporarily, but it is only a temporary 
objective you have gained. You have not changed anything 
fundamental at all. You have no real discipline, no real 
control. It can be beyond you in a minute. You may com- 
‘pel a boy to say “Yes, sir,” and snap his heels together, in 
the home. It may look pretty but it does not imply that he 
respects you or that he carries any “Yes, sir,” spirit into 
his activities outside the home. Real discipline in the home 
comes because the parents are capable of leading and are 
looked to naturally for this leadership. Out of this leader- 
ship grows discipline. 

What is needed, it seems to me, is a changed attitude 
on the part of parents through an understanding of what 
it is that the child is attempting to do and an ability to dif- 
ferentiate between what is merely symptomatic and what 
is real and of vital importance to the end that parents may 
co-operate in the vital things instead of resisting them. 

Confidence is needed. Not confidence in the child’s 


202 INTELLIGENT PARENTHOOD 


wisdom or in his ability to cope unaided with the complex 
problems that are facing him, the decisions he has to make, 
but confidence and belief in the rightness of the thing that 
he is attempting to do. 

The matters of detail and incident can then be han- 
dled. There will be differences of opinion between the 
child and the parents over the details, but these can be 
satisfactorily dealt with in spite of occasional electrical 
storms if there is confidence between these two and under- 
standing at least on the part of the parents. 

An adolescent boy is keen for advice. He goes to all 
sorts of places for it—except to his parents. He is as 
puzzled as he can be. His cocksureness has no reality in 
it. He is a very much puzzled, confused boy. He wants 
advice. He is dead against any advice that is obviously 
based upon a profound misunderstanding of the situation 
and that is either lachrymose or threatening. He knows 
that tears and threats are but a sign of weakness. They 
are not a sign of wisdom or of understanding. They affect 
him not at all. | 

He is particularly resentful, and rightfully so, of any 
appeal for good conduct on the ground of love of his 
mother. That is a very vital thing with him. It is a thing 
that is troubling him right now. It is a thing the enervat- 
ing of which he is, in a healthy way, trying to get away 
from, and to appeal to the weakest thing in him, the thing 
that he is trying to manage and get under control, he real- 
izes is wholly unfair; while you may force him to capitu- 
late temporarily, even permanently, you do him an incal- 
culable injury. Love of mother is an instrument of ter- 
rible potentiality. Because by its use we can so easily cow 
individuals into a semblance of proper conduct, we use it 


PROBLEMS OF THE ADOLESCENT 203 


recklessly. We go farther and extol the man who shows 
great devotion to his mother and to the raan who can weep 
at the name of “mother” we ascribe special virtue. The 
love of mother is too valuable an asset in the life of any 
man to run the risk of turning it into a liability through 
reckless use. 

A man who is “so good” to his mother is not always so 
good to his wife or so successful in his relationships with 
others; and a man’s life is more concerned with his wife 
and with others than with his mother. A wise mother 
should realize this and not demand too much. She should 
find her happiness, even though it be a bit wistful, in help- 
ing her boy to launch his life from her own and in seeing 
him strong and able because of her. 

So when there is nothing but misunderstanding, pro- 
found misunderstanding—which he cannot explain, but 
of which he is very well aware—and a lachrymose atti- 
tude, and threatening and appeals to his weakness when 
he is striking out for strength, the boy resists, as he should. 
He is said to be obstinate and resentful of advice—but he 
goes elsewhere hungry for advice. 

If a boy smashes a car or breaks his collar-bone in 
recklessness or comes home with alcohol on his breath, 
these are not necessarily signs of moral depravity. They 
are not, to be sure, desirable things in themselves, but 
they are an expression, even though a very awkward and 
undesirable expression, of a tendency that is healthy rath- 
er than unhealthy. 

Fainting and weeping mothers or storming fathers do 
not contribute anything at this time, except further to 
complicate the situation and produce a whole round of sec- 
ondary reactions which may be worse than the first and 


204 INTELLIGENT PARENTHOOD 


not nearly so healthy. The boy really didn’t wish to smash 
the car. He had no desire to break his neck. He probably 
didn’t wish to get drunk. However, he was wishing some- 
thing and he was trying to find some sort of an expression 
for it. Here parents can be of help. Even though the boy 
may not know what he is trying to do, they should know 
and with their greater ingenuity and experience enable 
the boy to find a more satisfactory expression. 

The important thing is not the particular detail, but 
the tendency. We lose track of the woods because of the 
trees. So absolutely fundamental and vital is this emanci- 
pation that it were far better that we have smashed cars 
and broken bones and even alcohol on breaths—particu- 
larly in view of the adolescent circumstances under which 
these adolescents have alcohol upon their breaths—than 
that this boy should fail in the objective toward which he 
is directed. 

The extent to which these expressions, unwise, awk- 
ward, damaging sometimes, will go, will be in proportion 
to the resistance that the boy meets at home—that is, if he 
is mentally and physically healthy. The objective will be 
safely attained in proportion to the co-operation that the 
boy obtains from the parents. This is a difficult time. 
Sometimes secondary reactions are so confusing that it is 
hard to keep in mind the real issue, but after all if the par- 
ents are in command of their own emotional forces, they 
will not overlook the woods for the trees and, instead of 
being so fearful and so anxious, they will be thankful that 
their adolescent is beginning to manifest evidences of a 
healthy adulthood and express their energies in assisting 
him to his goal. 


PROBLEMS OF THE ADOLESCENT 205 


They will rightfully be a bit concerned as to just what 
course events are going to take during this period of learn- 
ing to walk, but they will not doubt either the process or 
its necessity. They will have confidence in its rightfulness 
and in its probable eventual success. They will sit not in 
anxiety and fear but—a bit upon the sidelines, not too 
much in evidence, but yet there all the time—they will sit 
observing what is going on, encouraging what is going on, 
and guiding what is going on. 

If they find no tendency on the part of their boy or 
girl to make this emancipation, they will then become anxi- 
ous and they will begin to take steps gently to shove this 
backward duckling from the nest. 

Emancipation from the home does not mean leaving 
home, renouncing it as if it were something unworthy and 
no longer of need, freeing one’s self from all the relation- 
ships and co-relationships and community feeling that 
should exist in an intimate group and which can be so 
valuable, helpful, and stabilizing. (One must say should 
and can here although one would like to say do and are.) 
In some instances it may mean just this, but it should 
mean no more than the psychological freeing of one’s self 
from childish bonds, whether a childish fear and undue 
dominance by father or a childish love and dependence on 
mother, or both. The boy cannot successfully face life if 
weighed down by either of these things. He must master 
both. 

Now as to our second point, the development of hetero- 
sexuality. By heterosexuality, we mean a healthy, adult 
level of sexuality in which the primary sex interest of the 
individual is in the opposite sex. This is something the 
child must attain. These two problems are, as a matter of 


206 INTELLIGENT PARENTHOOD 


fact, very largely one problem, but for convenience of dis- 
cussion, we may separate them into two. Over this matter 
of sex we are greatly concerned. Our anxiety, however, is 
rather badly placed: it is not fear that the child may fail - 
in accomplishing a healthy development, thereby perma- 
nently crippling himself in a very serious and fundamen- 
tal way, but fear that in the process unpleasant things 
may happen, things perhaps of importance in themselves, 
but certainly of secondary importance to the success of 
the process itself. With failure of the latter, the conse- 
quences for the child (and society) are inevitable and per- 
manent; with the former, the permanence and importance 
are entirely as we choose to make them. So greatly have 
we magnified the importance of some of these secondary 
matters that the home, the church, the school, and society 
generally would seem to be banded together to defeat the 
child in attaining a healthy sex development. 

The child up to this period has not been heterosexual. 
Its sex life has not been fully developed. There are many 
issues yet to be solved before we may know just where on 
the scale of sexual development it is going to find its place. 
These adolescent years are of the greatest importance. 
This is the one period in the child’s life for this process. 
The one period for what? Certainly it is not the one time 
in life when the contents of high-school textbooks may be 
learned or the requirements of college-entrance boards 
satisfied or a dozen and one other responsibilities we load 
upon the adolescent fulfilled, but these are the only four 
or five years that he will ever have in all of his life to 
establish this fundamental thing, his own heterosexuality. 

If heterosexuality is not accomplished in these four 
or five years it never will be accomplished in a normal 


PROBLEMS OF THE ADOLESCENT 207 


way. It may be accomplished later by some technical in- 
terference, but then only after much conflict, failure, and 
illness. These four or five years hold the only chance the 
average boy and girl will have to establish their hetero- 
sexuality. Once prevented, it can never come naturally 
and normally again. It is a real problem, therefore, that 
faces the child, in spite of the importance of college- 
entrance examinations just ahead that face the parents. 

We tried for a time to protect ourselves and children 
(it really amounted to an attempt to defeat the effort of 
the child to establish its heterosexuality) by keeping them 
completely ignorant of all sex matters. The tragic results 
of this no one knows quite so well as the psychiatrist. 
Even people generally are now awake to the consequences 
that have followed and efforts are not now so commonly 
made to keep individuals in ignorance until the night they 
are married. 

But there are bars we still do put up. Heterosexuality 
cannot be attained in a vacuum. It cannot be attained by 
itself. It does not just happen; it is a development and 
growth that is nourished and continued by what it feeds 
upon. Heterosexuality will be established through contact 
and experience with those of the opposite sex. Anything, 
no matter for what purpose, that tends to make this con- 
tact too difficult is not in the interest of the child, or the 
parents or society. 

Yet an effort is made, when signs first begin to ap- 
pear that boys and girls are becoming interested in each 
other, to keep them apart. We are so fearful that some- 
thing is going to happen. Nothing—nothing so tragic 
could happen as that they should fail to accomplish this 
objective. Nothing! But we are so fearful. We lose sight 


208 INTELLIGENT PARENTHOOD 


of the importance and the necessity of the thing the child 
is attempting to do and lose ourselves in a round of fears 
over matters perhaps of importance in themselves, but 
certainly secondary, with the result that we lose our op- 
portunity to guide and protect and to co-operate with the 
child in the development and establishment of its hetero- 
sexuality. In a panic we try to deny it, to minimize it, 
to bar it out, to keep it away. 

Parents attempt to keep girls away from this boy or 
boys away from this girl. If unsuccessful, they then 
attempt very carefully to select the boy or the girl with 
whom their children may have contact. If done with real 
insight and understanding, this may be well, but on the 
other hand, it would be well to let the boy or the girl do a 
little of the choosing, for after all it is their psychology 
that has to be handled, not the parents’ psychology. 

The girl or the boy who may satisfy the parents’ emo- 
tional needs may be entirely unsatisfactory for the needs 
of the boy or girl. While we may well be careful here, a 
great deal of latitude is wise. And if we find that our 
adolescent boy has been out late some evening with some- 
one who lives on the other side of town and of whom, there- 
fore, we cannot thoroughly approve, we may keep a weath- 
er eye open to this, but we are not justied in “hitting the 
roof.” Without any “harm” to himself he will probably 
have learned more in that little contact that will be help- 
ful to him than he did at the very nicely supervised dance 
that was given the week before. 

We try to force upon these youngsters very unhealthy 
ideals. Here again I let myself in for misunderstanding, 
but I do not see that it can be avoided. Some very un- 
healthy ideals have grown up in the world around this 


PROBLEMS OF THE ADOLESCENT 209 


matter of sex, based largely on fears coming from a lack 
of understanding and philosophies of life constructed out 
of ignorance. One of the worst is this—the idealization of 
women themselves, the placing of women upon pedestals 
as something too fine, too sacred, too fragile to be handled 
in anything but the most genteel, considerate way. 

A boy is taught, in the first place, that matters of sex 
are degrading, wrong, and sinful (at least for him and 
probably a little bit for everybody), but this teaching be- 
ing not altogether successful, we further try to ‘“‘protect” 
him by creating in him an attitude toward women that we 
think will make him “safe.” We teach him that in his con- 
sideration of women, he must keep in mind his mother and 
sister; that he must not say or think or act in any way 
with another woman that he would not say, think, or act 
with his mother or sister, or want them to know about. 

These are frighfully unhealthy ideas. Tremendous 
damage is done by them. Here again nobody knows as does 
the psychiatrist how devastating the damage has been to 
thousands of men and women, through this utterly false 
ideal. Women are not the fragile, delicate, sacred little 
things that they have been pictured. Women are human, 
vigorous individuals who can pretty well handle them- 
selves. 

While it is perfectly right to point out to boys that 
under certain circumstances women must be carefully 
guarded and protected, it is wrong to put into their ado- 
lescent minds at the critical time when they are normally, 
healthfully approaching the development of their hetero- 
sexuality that women must not be thought of in any way 
except as they would think of their mothers and sisters. 

This is one of the chief causes for the failure of the 


210 INTELLIGENT PARENTHOOD 


establishment of heterosexuality on the part of the boy 
which interferes later with his married life, which drives 
him to prostitution, which drives him to abnormal sex ex- 
pression and to those twists and quirks of personality 
and character that go deep in his life and fundamentally 
change and frequently ruin it. 

Equally unhealthy ideas are foisted upon girls in re- 
gard to the depravity of men and the great care that they 
must use, therefore, in protecting themselves from the sex- 
ual attacks of men. In order to “protect” them they are 
so filled with fears that they are seriously handicapped 
even in everyday social relationships and their hetero- 
sexual development, necessary in happy marital relations, 
successful motherhood, and all adult social contacts, is de- 
feated. 

Through fears growing out of obviously mistaken 
ideas as to what sort of beings human beings are and what 
our goals in life should be, there has grown up a notion 
that sexual purity is valuable as an end in itself. A quality 
or condition may have a social value without being valu- 
able as an end in itself. If purity, either of men or women, 
is useful in keeping society properly organized and sta- 
bilized, then it has a social value, but it does not follow 
that purity as an end in itself is valuable. The value of 
the first does not close the door to a study of the second 
and when we come to separate these, we may find that 
purity as an end in itself may be not only not socially 
valuable but socially harmful to a degree that will sur- 
prise us. 

A few years ago a traveling salesman, thirty-nine 
years of age, committed suicide in a rural New England 
hotel. He left a letter for his mother in which he expressed 


PROBLEMS OF THE ADOLESCENT 211 


his love for her, his regret at the sorrow that what he was 
about to do would bring to her, but explaining that he 
could not face life and his failure any longer. He closed 
his letter with the sentence, “Anyway, mother, I remained 
a pure boy.” Are we supposed to rejoice at this, to sing 
hosannas over this man’s “victory”? Could anything be 
more tragic than this man’s feeling that the most impor- 
tant thing in his whole life was that he should remain a 
“pure” man? Would it have been more tragic had he not 
remained “pure”? We cannot rejoice over this “victory.” 
We can see in it only the tragic frustration, due to a fail- 
ure to emancipate himself from a childish dependence up- 
on his mother and to his failure to establish an adult hete- 
rosexuality, which made a normal, healthy home and mari- 
tal life with its train of satisfaction, happiness, and suc- 
cess, personal and social, impossible and brought only de- 
spair, failure, and death. 

Purity on this basis is not a fine thing. And in our 
efforts to keep boys and girls pure, let us not force upon 
them a spurious purity which is not purity, but a disease. 

Let me reiterate that I am not advocating license, or 
unlimited freedom among adolescents or any other group, 
but I do mean this: that if accidents happen in the effort 
of adolescents to establish their heterosexuality, the dis- 
grace and humiliation that follow are only because we feel 
it, because we make it so, not really. 

There are good, social reasons for guarding carefully 
the developing sex life of adolescents and guard them 
wisely we should, but if in the difficult process through 
which they are going things do happen, it is better that 
they do and heterosexuality be established than that they 
should not happen and ill health and abnormality be the 


212 INTELLIGENT PARENTHOOD 


result. I do not say that only one of the two things can 
happen, but if in this highly charged situation something 
does happen, nothing really serious has happened until we 
make it so. Parents should keep that in mind. By our 
present methods we frequently offer a child but one of the 
two alternatives. 

When adolescents try to make contacts with each 
other in their fumbling, awkward way, we tend to regard 
the whole business either with great suspicion or with ley- 
ity. Instead of seeing the real significance and beauty— 
and there is nothing so beautiful as this first romanticism 
of boys and girls in their groping toward an adult hetero- 
sexual life; there is probably no love quite so beautiful, if 
impermanent, no relationship ever later in life quite so 
charming, quite so lovely, quite so unself-conscious, so 
spontaneous and uncalculating as this—and instead of see- 
ing these qualities in it, we degrade it to our own level and 
see only what is common and vulgar. 

You cannot convince these boys and these girls that 
what has been happening within them and between them 
is common and vulgar, for down in the depths of their 
hearts, they know that it wasn’t. Never has life seemed so 
fine or so full of wonderment, never have things seemed so 
precious or virtues they have been inclined to scorn seemed 
so desirable, never have they felt so generous or so kindly 
disposed as in these new emotional relationships. You 
only alienate and you only defeat your own purposes when 
you try to make base what really has beauty and health 
and naturalness, but which unfortunately can’t be freely 
exercised because of the complex society in which we must 
live. You do not convince the child but you can so coerce 
him as to make him self-conscious, secretive and guilty 


PROBLEMS OF THE ADOLESCENT 213 


and finally calculating, vulgar, base and unhealthy. The 
opposite attitude of taking all too lightly and poking fun 
at his emotional experiences is also unfortunate. 

These are some of the. bars we have put up to defeat - 
the attainment of heterosexuality upon the part of adoles- 
cents. T’o protect them from mud puddles, we cause them 
to fall into a pit from which they cannot dig them- 
selves out. 

In facing the world then, every adolescent, in spite of 
all the complex problems we give him, most of which are 
artificial or only relatively important, has only two prob- 
lems really. One is to emancipate himself from the home, 
and the other is to establish his heterosexuality. Upon the 
success of these two accomplishments will depend all the 
future relationships that he will have with men as he goes 
out into the world to deal with men, that he will have with 
women as he meets them about the world; it will have much 
to do with his choice of a profession, much to do with his 
success or failure in his profession, everything in the world 
to do with the success of his marriage. Upon this will de- 
pend also his excellence as a parent and as a citizen, his 
attitude toward public questions such as morals, ethics, re- 
ligion, and public policy, his general efficiency, his mental 
and physical health. 

If he does not accomplish this emancipation and this 
heterosexuality, his relationships to men and women can- 
not be upon a normal, healthy basis but can only be con- 
fused ; his marriage can at best be but a partial success— 
most likely a failure, whether acknowledged or endured; 
through his parenthood he will distort the life of his chil- 
dren, handicapping them as he has been handicapped; as 
a citizen, his attitude on public questions of morals, ethics, 


214 INTELLIGENT PARENTHOOD 


religion, and public policy will be determined in relation 
to his own unsolved problems rather than from the con- 
sideration of realities. From such, a sound, satisfactory, 
healthy moral world cannot come. 
So I repeat that the two things that a child must ac- 
complish—and these are the only years of his life that he 
has in which to accomplish them—are to emancipate him- 
self from the home and to establish his heterosexuality. 


TRAINING FOR CHARACTER 









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CHAIRMAN’S ADDRESS 


Frederic Cambell Woodward, Professor of Law, and 
Vice-President of the University of Chicago 

I am sure it is a source of the deepest gratification to 
the organizers of this Conference that this dinner meeting 
is so largely attended. Your presence here is an impres- 
sive demonstration of the deep and widespread interest in 
the subject of the Conference, and a happy augury for the 
future of Chicago—and not of Chicago alone but of 
America. For as the child of today is the citizen of tomor- 
row, so just as surely is the well-nurtured and intelligently 
trained child of today the good citizen of tomorrow; and 
it is axiomatic that good citizenship is the one indispensa- 
ble ingredient in the making of a truly great and happy 
land. 

In assuming the chairmanship of this meeting, I must 
at the outset disclaim responsibility as an authority in the 
field of character-training. If I were not a father myself, 
or if, being a father, I were far from home, I might be 
tempted to pose as one of the splendid group of experts 
who have so generously responded to the invitation to par- 
ticipate in the Conference. For one who speaks as an ex- 
pert is at least listened to with respect. But the presence 
of many of my friends and neighbors compels me to con- 
fess that I am here, personally, in the capacity of one who 
seeks, not to guide, but for guidance; and that I occupy 
the chair as the representative of the University of Chi- 
cago, of whose interest in and support of this movement I 
welcome the opportunity to assure you. 


217 


218 INTELLIGENT PARENTHOOD 


As I have suggested, the experience of being a father 

is one, which, if taken seriously to heart, makes for humil- 
~ ity. I suppose that every man, before he becomes a father, 
is prone to believe that the one requisite of successful 
fatherhood is that good sturdy common sense, with which, 
however modest in other respects he may be, he considers 
himself richly endowed. And I would not disparage the 
importance of common sense anymore than I would dis- 
narage the importance of mother-love, as a factor in the 
training of the child. But when the father discovers, as he 
often does, that his common sense, or what he had fondly 
regarded as his common sense, does not bring the results 
that he had expected to achieve, one of two things is likely 
to happen. Either he saves his pride, and perhaps his dis- 
position, by concluding that after all the training of the 
child is the mother’s job—which conclusion he may secret- 
ly reinforce with the reflection that since the child has in- 
herited its faults from the mother’s side of the family, he 
is not responsible for them anyway. Or else he takes off 
his coat of pride and buckles down to what he now real- 
izes is a task which will tax his patience, his resourceful- 
ness, and his self-control. 

You may have heard the story of the man on a railway 
train who was observed to be vigorously pounding his 
little child on the back. A woman who was a fellow-pas- 
senger, indignant at what looked to her like a brutal beat- 
ing, remonstrated with him, declaring that if he didn’t 
stop beating the child she would make trouble for him. 
“Madam,” replied the man, “my oldest child has been ex- 
pelled from school for stealing; my second child is quar- 
antined with the measles; and this youngster across my 


TRAINING FOR CHARACTER 219 


knee has just swallowed a safety-pin. You can’t make 
trouble for me!” 

The heart of every father must go out in understand- 
ing sympathy to the harrassed soul of the hero of this 
affecting tale. 

Of course the father normally does not face his task 
alone. He has the co-operation of the mother; or, to put 
the emphasis in the right place, the mother has his co- 
operation. But even this co-operation is sometimes diffi- 
cult to maintain. For it involves not only mutual confi- 
dence and good will but the ability graciously to accept 
and heartily to act upon the judgment of another—an- 
other whom one does not honestly consider one’s superior 
in intelligence. I have not doubt that the happiness of 
many a husband and wife has come to shipwreck upon this 
rock. There is the story of the man who married a sales- 
woman in Marshall Field’s store, to whom he had been 
first attracted by the courtesy and kindliness with which 
she had assisted him in some difficult shopping. All went 
merrily until a baby came and for a time thereafter. But 
when the youngster became a problem and the father and 
mother disagreed as to the proper method of dealing with 
the problem, the father confessed to an old friend that 
there were moments when he wished that he had done his 
shopping at Mandel’s instead of Field’s. 

But assuming the successful co-operation of the par- 
ents, they will sometimes find themselves baffled. They 
will learn that children are not little men and women; that 
they are strange little creatures whose psychology it is 
difficult for grown-ups to understand. President Mason 
tells a story of his experience with a young dog which illus- 
trates my point. The dog was somewhat indisposed and 


220 INTELLIGENT PARENTHOOD 


the veterinary had prescribed castor oil. Dr. Mason ex- 
pected to have a struggle when he attempted to administer 
the dose, so he summoned the whole family to hold the pup 
down. When all was ready he forced the medicine into the 
poor beast’s mouth, and then ordered the family to release 
him. The dog jumped up, wagging his tail, and began 
eagerly to lick the spoon which Dr. Mason still held in his 
hand. So it often is with children. In tastes and impulses 
and emotional reactions they differ disconcertingly from 
our preconceptions. Bad habits are quickly formed and 
distressingly hard to break. Astonishing traits of char- 
acter appear, apparently from thin air, and strenuously 
resist eradication. 

Then it is that the wise parent of today seeks the ex- 
pert. In this age of specialization, there are many intelli- 
gent men and women, fortunately, who as educators, psy- 
chologists, and psychiatrists, are devoting their lives to 
the study of the child—not of the abnormal and subnor- 
mal child alone, but of the normal child—the normal child 
of normal parents living in a normal environment. The 
purpose of this conference is to disseminate the knowl- 
edge of these men and women. And the purpose of the 
Association for Child Study and Parent Education is to 
disseminate such knowledge through small groups of par- 
ents who gather from time to time in their respective com- 
munities. There are, I believe, twelve such groups in Chi- 
cago today. There ought to be hundreds of them. There 
ought to be, and I hope there soon will be, a body of uni- 
versity trained women who are especially equipped to in- 
terpret the work of the experts to the parents and to carry 
back to the experts the results of their experience. 

We are, I believe, on the threshold of an era in which 


TRAINING FOR CHARACTER 221 


knowledge of the art and science of child-training will 
be vastly increased. The motto of the University comes to 
my mind. Crescat scientia vita excolatur—‘‘Let knowl- 
edge grow that life may be enriched.” Let the knowledge 
of parents grow that the lives of their children may be en- 
riched ; that in the precious formative years the little kinks 
of habit and character may be straightened out, and the 
children set, with shining faces, upon the road to happi- 
ness—the road to honorable lives and useful service. 


THE FATHER’S RESPONSIBILITY IN THE — 
TRAINING OF HIS CHILDREN 
Henry Newmann, Author of “Education for Moral Growth” and 
Leader, Brooklyn Society for Ethical Culture 

Bringing up children today is harder than it used to 
be. Life is more complex; and the business of rearing the 
young requires all the best of all the brains that can be 
brought to bear upon the problems. The business man 
knows that he cannot trust the conduct of his affairs to 
hit-or-miss salesmanship or financing, but must take long 
looks ahead and call to his aid every available bit of use- 
ful counsel. Is the job of training boys and girls any less 
in need of the combination of good hard sense and sound 
information? What would it not mean if even a sizable 
fraction of the energy and intelligence put into business 
went into working out with the mothers the best ways of 
living for and with the boys and girls? Many widows 
bring up excellent children; but for all their success, they 
know that they could have done better with the life-long 
co-operation of their partners. 

On the surface it would seem that what the father 
brings to the mental and moral nurture of the family is 
negligible. The relation of child and mother is indeed 
closer in every way. The wife is usually so completely the 
parent that she can be little else; but her husband has his 
livelihood, his citizenship, half-a-dozen concerns outside of 
his fatherhood, to occupy him. Parentage in and of itself, 
therefore, he is less likely to take as seriously as she does. 

Perhaps the chief difficulty rises from the father’s 


222 


TRAINING FOR CHARACTER 223 


thinking that he can be absolved from other duties toward 
the home because he must put his main energies into 
money-making. Many an excellent man is tempted to for- 
get that the best offering he can make his children is him- 
self. He comes home from work late and fatigued. To 
spend time with his boys and girls and interest himself 
properly in their problems is often impossible for the man 
who has been harassed to the point of extreme irritability. 
In thousands of homes, there is a kind of jealousy on the 
part of the wife which is quite justifiable. She knows her 
husband’s gifts, and she sees him spend them—where? 
On his home? It is in his job outside that he is so ener- 
getic and resourceful; and what he brings home is a brain 
too tired to be used with anything like the same vigor for 
the good of his children. 

And yet even busy men can find time for the things 
they want deeply enough. There is an interesting note on 
this theme in the autobiography of John Stuart Mill. His 
father, he says, a man who never did anything negligently, 
managed with all his burdens to occupy himself during ten 
years with writing a history of India. Nevertheless, de- 
clares the son, 

During the whole period a considerable part of almost 
every day was employed in the instruction of his children. 
- . + » What he was willing to undergo for the sake of 
my instruction may be judged from the fact that I went 
through the whole process of preparing my Greek lessons 
in the same room and at the same table at which he was 
writing; and as in those days Greek and English lexicons 
were not, and I could make no use of a Greek and Latin 
lexicon, I was forced to have recourse to him for the mean- 
ing of every word I did not know. This incessant inter- 
ruption he, one of the most impatient of men, submitted 


Q24 INTELLIGENT PARENTHOOD 


to, and wrote under that interruption several volumes of 
his history and all else that he had to write during those 
years. 

It is significant to have this leader among the nine- 
teenth-century economists record that his father instructed 
him in political economy “‘by a sort of lecture which he de- 
livered in our walks.” Compare this tribute with a child’s 
remembering his father chiefly as the one who either 
scolded him, or else played with him (or did both), or as 
the one who left him a lot of gilt-edge securities. 

Suppose now that fathers made the effort—and it is 
surprising how much can be done when the will is strong 
—suppose that even if they could not shorten their work- 
ing-hours, they gave the children more of the time which 
they spend on meaningless recreation? Admitted that they 
must get away from their business cares. Here in the com- 
pany of their children, is an opportunity to do so with 
lasting profit to all concerned. 

What contributions are there which a father can 
make? Much is gained by the mere fact of his co-operat- 
ing with the mother. In addition, there are special offer- 
ings of his own which he can give. He can bring to the 
home the best of qualities encouraged by his work outside. 
What is especially serviceable in the standards by which 
he judges and is judged there is the test of strict achieve- 
ment. If he is a doctor, he must cure the sick; if he is a 
lawyer, he must get justice for his client. Whatever his 
work, he must make good; for in his world, people are 
estimated not according to what they dream or promise, 
but according to what they actually perform. On the other 
hand, the mother—we are speaking in very general terms 
—is likely to rate her children more on the promise which 


ts 


TRAINING FOR CHARACTER 225 


she divines than on their definite accomplishment. Un- 
doubtedly her household work puts upon her, too, the test 
of strict performance. Nevertheless, in dealing with her 
boys and girls, she also brings another viewpoint to bear. 
When her child falls short, she is the more readily in- 
clined to forgiveness, because the mother-love sees the 
whole child, not simply the present failure. Just as before 
birth the entire little body was enfolded within hers, so 
now the whole nature of the child is embraced in her affec- 
tion. She can love it not chiefly for this or that grace or 
special aptitude or achievement, but for all that her for- 
ward-reaching fondness imagines it may become, forecast- 
ing the flower while-the bud is still green and hard. That 
is why the mother is so peculiarly fitted to be the teacher 
of the very young long before they are at all capable of 
making good. 

Necessary as this evaluation by the mother is, the 
other stricter standard, however, is likewise essential. 
Dear as even the failure is to the mother-heart, life calls 
upon the child, in the language of the business world, to 
deliver the goods. It must be a proficient student, the right 
kind of neighbor, a reliable worker. For all its delightful 
promise, it has very definite occasions where it must toe 
the mark. Hence the need for supplementing the mother- 
standard by strict insistence upon present accomplish- 
ment. Where should we be if we lost the qualities that 
make it possible to get the world’s work done and not 
simply hoped for? 

Here then is one of the offerings which the father 
can contribute from his life in the hard world outside. Not 
at all that the attitude which judges a child for what it 
promises to be is one whit less necessary. At every stage 


226 INTELLIGENT PARENTHOOD 


of life, both standards are required. All of us are rightly 
held accountable for certain very definite measures of 
achievement; and at the same time we are entitled to be 
judged for what we are not as yet but only may become. 
In the ideal home, these two methods of evaluation work 
hand in hand, each supplementing the other. It is quite 
possible for a father or a mother alone to be skilled in 
both kinds. As a general thing, however, the two view- 
points are likely to be different; and the children need 
both. 

The second distinct contribution by the father is the 
lesson of his broader practical acquaintance with men and 
affairs. The mother’s world is in some respects physically 
narrower than his. Often—and again there are many ex- 
ceptions—it is out of the question for her to get his first- 
hand experience with business and with large world-prob- 
lems, or to be thrown into contact like his with all sorts of 
conditions and persons. Her excursions are apt to be 
larger and more varied in the world which is unseen of the 
bodily eye. The father, on the other hand, is apt to be 
more direct in his outlook upon life, more immediately 
practical, less given to the imaginings, for instance, which 
make the charm of literature. 

For that very reason he has much to bring to his home 
—not the heavy-footed disenchantment which tramples 
upon the child’s imaginative creations, but the sounder les- 
sons of his hard experiences, such a lesson, for example, 
as the need of seeing certain facts without illusion and in- 
terpreting them broadly and obj ectively. I think in this 
connection of what was told to me by an exceedingly capa- 
ble woman, an able mother who is at the same time a social 
reformer with a broad vision and a good grasp upon the 


TRAINING FOR CHARACTER Q27 


actual difficulties of her aims. She told me that much of 
her understanding of life she owed to her father, a suc- 
cessful man of business. She never went to college, but 
she received in her youth what no college could have given 
her so well. She used to walk to school with her father on 
his way to business, and in these conversations she learned 
the man’s point of view about business, about what men 
think of women, about politics and world-affairs, the prob- 
lems of the day, in short, as they looked to a man who had 
his ideals and his hard contacts with the world too. This 
is an instance of the father’s contribution from his special 
experiences with the larger affairs outside—the solidity 
no less essential than the fineness. 

A third special offering is the father’s chance to teach 
his sons the right attitude toward women. This does not 
concern chiefly the need of clean views upon the subject 
of sex, although it may be said in passing that this instruc- 
tion is far more the duty of the home than of the school. 
The average father may plead that here he is without the 
particular skill required by the teacher; but if he has the 
affection and the confidence of his sons, he possesses what 
the ordinary teacher is less likely to enjoy; and with this 
invaluable fund to begin with, he can readily enough ac- 
quire the minor details of method. 

The more inclusive consideration, however, is the les- 
son of respect for womankind taught by the father’s own 
example at home. A son may become a poor husband be- 
cause of his father’s failure. And such failure, need we 
say, may occur even when it does not include wife-beat- 
ing? There is still a chivalry which is by no means alto- 
gether out-moded. 

Again, the father can do much to keep his sons from 


228 INTELLIGENT PARENTHOOD 


thinking that all idealism is something to be scorned as 
womanish. Many a lad, interested early in his life in cul- 
ture, comes to think that to be red-blooded he must turn 
his back on that sort of thing. He is less likely to take so 
foolish a view when his father cultivates these finer inter- 
ests. For the same reason, one cannot help wishing that 
more fathers took an active part in movements for world- 
peace. Why should such efforts be promoted chiefly by 
women? If the world is to move on to a day where the na- 
tions settle their differences by something better than 
wading through slaughter, why are not more fathers will- 
ing to be counted among the supporters of such a view? 
Some perhaps are afraid of being thought unmanly. May 
it not, however, be still more manly to let yourself 
be counted among the minority who champion a sorely 
needed ideal? Here the father can be of no slight help- 
fulness as the teacher of his sons. 


What, in return, does the father get from all this par- 
ticipation in the training of his children? The consequence 
is a certain broadening influence which makes the child in 
a very real sense a civilizer, the savior of its own parents. 

The influence of the child upon its parents begins 
even before it is born. It is a poor type of male who does 
not respond to the appeal of the mother’s helplessness in 
those months before the birth and after. Now, even if at 
no other time, the man must be specially the protector, not 
simply against outside harm, but against his own uncivi- 
lized nature. If there is any gentleness in his make-up, 
now is the occasion to show it, and by exercising it, to 
deepen it, as all our capabilities are intensified by use. 
The social significance of this fact is far-reaching. It 


TRAINING FOR CHARACTER 229 


would pay us to read John Fiske’s Meaning of Infancy 
again to remember how, this necessity for looking after 
the family helped to modify man’s roving disposition, to 
attach him to his home, and so to build up the institution 
on which society now rests. 

The child’s influence extends, and should be encour- 
aged to do so, over all the father’s life. Once the child is 
able to talk, how much it teaches the father! What is a 
man to do when he has a reputation for wisdom to main- 
tain but cannot answer questions about butterflies and air- 
planes and why Christmas trees always stay green? He 
must hark back to his own school days, to a renewed inter- 
est in geography, history, nature study, literature. He 
must recall old songs and even become poet and composer 
when a halting recollection obliges him to invent new 
words and new tunes. He must go back to old games; and 
he gets down on his hands and knees again—a more excel- 
lent tonic than his expensive gymnasium can give. By be- 
ing a make-believe bear for a few moments he is less likely 
to be a real one at other times. So the civilizing process 
continues through his life. When his children grow older 
and the problems of high school or vocation call upon him 
and his wife for their most careful thought, he cannot re- 
main the overspecialized creature that his work tends to 
make of him. 

_ In general it is impossible for the father who takes 
his parenthood seriously to remain unaffected for the bet- 
ter. He cannot help putting to himself the most searching 
questions about the whole of his life outside the home or 
within. If, for instance, the strain of the daily labors 
leaves him and other fathers too tired to interest them- 
selves as they should in their children’s upbringing, that 


230 INTELLIGENT PARENTHOOD 


is, if work as carried on today makes men worse parents, 
then what should they try to make business become? Or if 
the main thing which a father can give his children is not 
his money, then what is he in business for? That is a fun- 
damental question, a religious question if you will; and 
the greatest service which a child can offer its parents is 
to make them put to themselves questions of that very sort. 
No man can be genuinely a father without getting these 
glimpses into worthier living in general. 

There is a scene in The Mill on the Floss which aptly 
‘Jlustrates this effect. Mr. Tulliver has two children, 
Maggie, the special treasure of his heart, and Tom, who is 
more or less kind to his sister but in the main apt to be too 
strict. Tulliver, who is hard pushed for cash, visits his 
married sister to collect a debt of three hundred pounds 
which is long overdue, but which, because of the straitened 
circumstances in the Moss household, he has foreborne to 
press. Quite innocently Mrs. Moss speaks with fondness 
of his Maggie, “‘the little wench”; but when she refers to 
her own four boys and four girls, Mr. Tulliver hints rather 
broadly that “girls must fend for themselves, they must 
not look to hanging on their brothers.” “No,” Mrs. Moss 
answers; “but I hope their brothers’ll love the poor things 
not but what I hope your boy ‘ull allays be good to his 
sister.” Mr. Tulliver then comes to the point and insists, 
in spite of hard times, upon having his money. But on the 
homeward ride his sister’s allusions to Maggie continually 
recur. “Poor little wench! She’ll have nobody but Tom 
belike when I’m gone.” And even now Tom is inclined to 
be hard with her. The upshot is that almost without realiz- 
ing the fact, he turns his horse back to the Moss home. He 


TRAINING FOR CHARACTER 231 


finds his sister still crying. ‘There, there,’ he says, 
“don’t you fret. I’ll make a shift without the money a bit.” 

Many a father, perhaps without full awareness of the 
reason, has been touched to greater considerateness by 
love for his child. The world needs a conscious extending 
of that spirit. As parenthood taken seriously makes the 
man a better husband, so should it likewise make him the 
better citizen. It should reveal to him the claims of other 
children than his own, denied the wholesome influences 
granted to his boys and girls, the claims of the countless 
parents no less anxious than himself to make excellent per- 
sons of their sons and daughters, but thwarted by un- 
friendly circumstance. The world is entering, we trust, 
upon a new era to be characterized by greater fair play in 
its competitions, greater mercy toward the handicapped, 
greater consideration in general. The special fitness of 
women for the furthering of this task is made much of by 
the advocates of woman’s suffrage. But it is an error to say 
that the inauguration of this better day is the work of the 
world’s mothers. It is no less the work of the world’s fath- 
ers. It will be done better when men and women under- 
take it jointly. For the fathers themselves it will be a 
benefit when this is what their parenthood makes of them. 

Finally, a right attitude toward fatherhood, an appre- 
ciation of what the man is specially fitted to give to the 
home and of what he can make of himself through the 
proper exercise of his function, would go a long way to- 
ward cleaning up prevailing misconceptions on the subject 
of marriage and divorce. 

Those who advocate the state care of children whose 
parents have separated overlook not only the child’s need 
of both parents, but the good effects wrought upon the 


232 INTELLIGENT PARENTHOOD 


fathers and mothers themselves through the carrying of 
their responsibilities. What mothers thus make of them- 
selves is readily admitted. Is the development of person- 
ality on the father any less important? The home is pecu- 
liarly the hearth where the pieties of life are kindled and 
kept burning. It offers a unique opportunity for all its 
members, parents no less than children, to be trained in 
the fundamental loyalties; and for this purpose it requires 
the gifts of both parents in constant interaction. Partner- 
ships in marriage will not be changed lightly when fathers 
and mothers take to heart the life-long need their children 
have for all the best that both parents can give. 


THE RELATION OF INTELLIGENCE 
TO CHARACTER 
Dr. Ira 8. Wile, Associate in Pediatrics, Mount Sinai H ospital, 
New York City 

Much has been said upon the subject of intelligence 
during recent years. Each writer and speaker views the 
subject more or less from his own standpoint. Some, for 
one reason or another, regard the head as the most impor- 
tant part of the body. For example, there was an old bar- 
ber who, while he was carefully shampooing the head of 
one of his customers, remarked, “You have a very large 
head ; it is a fine thing to have a large head; it means you 
have a large brain; it is a fine thing to have a large brain, 
because it nourishes the roots of the hair.” Everyone does 
_ not find in heads just that particular degree of worth and 
value, but all who are interested in education or in health, 
in child nurture or welfare, have given some consideration 
to the subject of intelligence. 

Intelligence and character! Whatis intelligence? Let 
me present the terms with which we are dealing in the 
light of their meanings as I shall apply them tonight. In- 
telligence is generally regarded as learning ability. Some 
children learn more, and some learn less, but both types 
possess intelligence. The most intelligent do not always 
learn the-most; sometimes the less intelligent apply them- 
selves more industriously and walk away with the prizes. 

Another aspect of intelligence lies in its definition as 
the capacity to adapt one’s self to new situations, to novel 
situations in life; the ability to grasp things—not with the | 

233 


234 INTELLIGENT PARENTHOOD 


hands, but with the mind. Very frequently those who 
grasp easily with the mind also grasp well with the hands. 
Intelligence is defined by another group as a problem- 
solving ability; by still others it is held to be merely di- 
rected thinking. Many deem judgment to be one of the 
elements of intellectual action essential in shaping char- 
acter; whereas others believe that the degree of judgment 
requisite to develop character is not particularly great. 

Character is variously defined. As we ordinarily em- 
ploy the word we think of it in its positive and advantage- 
ous phases, although we all sometimes speak of bad char- 
acter as well as good character. Character is generally 
regarded as one’s moral force, or influence, the comple- 
ment of man’s ethical concepts and traits, regardless of 
whether they are native or acquired. 

One definition of character rather interests me. It is 
by an English psychologist, Dr. Cyril Burt, who defines 
character as “The sum total of those personal qualities of 
mind which do not constitute, or are not pervaded by intel- 
ligence. They are marked by feeling rather than by knowl- 
edge; by will rather than by skill.” That is a definition in 
which character is not given very much grace or sanction 
on the basis of intellect. 

Roback’s definition of character is somewhat arresting 
—a definition that says it is “an enduring psycho-physical 
disposition to inhibit instinctive impulses in accordance 
with a regulative principle.” That is tantamount to say- 
ing that we evidence intelligence in action by the things 
that we do not do far more than by the things that we do. 
Certainly the great process of socialization, the great val- 
ues which are achieved through the demonstration of char- 
acter, arise from the non-performance of many things 


TRAINING FOR CHARACTER 235 


which we feel impelled to do. The stress properly falls on 
self-control, the denial of self, the refusal to act upon im- 
pulse, and our general willingness to inhibit things in the 
interest of the large social group. 

There is a variety of opinions, I am quite frank to ad- 
mit, but none is so insistent as those relating to intelli- 
gence quotients, as many speak of the Intelligence Quo- 
tient as though it had some peculiar sacrosanct signifi- 
cance, as though it were the dominating thing in life—a 
strange mechanism to conjure with. If there is a high I.Q. 
all the rest of the world can go hang—sometimes one can 
hang, too, with a most superior I.Q. 

Many years ago, Dr. Goddard, from his work with 
the feeble-minded, came to the conclusion that approxi- 
mately 50 per cent of criminals were defectives. It is only 
fair to say that most of the humans whom Dr. Goddard 
studied were confined in institutions; and one can under- 
stand that the more defective group would be there. He 
did not make his studies in any halls of legislation. He 
even went so far as to say, “It is not a question of stature 
or age, but of mentality that determines an individual’s 
conduct.” 

Mental competency is indispensable to moral respon- 
sibility; but if mental competency is to be interpreted 
solely as intelligence, then I think that the practical stand- 
ards of the world represent higher competency than could 
be expected from the results of the psychological examina- 
tions of military draftees. The intelligence levels were 
not as high as the educational group had hoped to find. 
The moral levels could not be postulated from the intelli- 
gence levels. | 


236 INTELLIGENT PARENTHOOD 


On the other hand, a psychiatrist, Dr. Campbell, of 

the Boston Psychopathic Hospital, after noting: “The 
dynamic elements involved in the relationship of one hu- 
man to another are among the most primitive and deep- 
rooted forces in human nature,” frankly goes on to say, 
“In this relationship the intelligence plays but a small 
part.” ; 
You may choose between the attitude of the psychiat- 
rist and that of equally vigorous thinkers as to the part 
which intelligence really plays in the development of 
character. , 

Dr. Terman, with a special interest in gifted children, 
has made a very careful genetic study of 1,000 geniuses 
on the western coast, but he was not able to find that they 
were particularly superior in character. He did find a 
rather high correlation between these magnificent intel- 
lects and their traits and dispositions, but he was frank to 
admit that possibly 20 per cent of this gifted group had 
more defects in character than the average child in the 
community. That is not a very strong correlation for high- 
est intelligence and highest standards of character. How- 
ever, even that is not so bad, when one bears in mind the 
dictum of Dr. Murchison, from Dr. Burnham’s excellent 
institution, in the striking sentence: “Intelligence is just 
as serious a problem for criminology as is feeble-minded- 
ness.” This bids us stop, look, and listen. 

I am emphasizing the status of the intelligence quo- 
tient because so much has been said about it that would 
lead one to believe that those who lack a superior mental- 
ity are inferior in other respects. The intellectual capac- 
ity of an individual as detected by tests now utilized does 
not yield a measure of his mind, nor afford a complete sur- 





TRAINING FOR CHARACTER 237 


vey of his personality. The test material is useful to in- © 
dicate but one phase of human personality—the capacity 
to adapt to new situations. The tests do not reveal spon- 
taneity of interest, of initiative, of enthusiasm, or sense of 
moral responsibility. They give little insight into the real 
springs of feeling and action of the child who is tested. 
Therefore, we have to seek for some explanations of char- 
acter other than in terms of intelligence quotients. I would 
not go so far as Professor Herbert Martin in his study, 
Formative Foundations of Character: “Intelligence has 
long been regarded not only as of doubtful worth in the 
realm of morals, but as an altogether perilous possession. 
Knowledge and moral peril vary directly.” 

I almost hesitate to quote Martin to an audience such 
as this, which I must assume to possess considerable 
knowledge. On the other hand, I am reminded of that 
rare discussion about knowledge and intelligence that was 
held some time ago. One man asked another how to dis- 
tinguish between intelligence and knowledge, and this is 
what he replied: “Well, now, I’ll tell you. Intelligence is 
that capacity of the human mind which enables a man to 
succeed in life without knowledge; and knowledge is that 
sum of learning in the human mind which enables one to 
succeed without intelligence.” These obvious distinctions 
are sometimes regarded as having a definite place in fos- 
tering character-development; it is often urged that mere 
knowledge is productive of character or that mere intelli- 
gence is productive of character. Obviously, the inherited 
capacity for intellectual action is existent at birth; it can 
never rise above its source. It rarely is developed to the 
point of promise in the egg. Knowledge is not synony- 


238 INTELLIGENT PARENTHOOD 


mous with intelligence but is dependent upon the utiliza- 
tion of intelligence. 

Character is not so static. It is dynamic. It is in a 
state of flux—in a state of change—in a state of constant 
shifting. It is not as enduring in practical living as it is in 
theory. It is something that is constantly modified by new 
contacts with persons and objects, by new situations, new 
temptations, new opportunities, and new realizations. Or- 
dinarily human behavior as we find it in human society is 
an indefinite mixture rather than a real synthesis of ele- 
ments. It has a large portion of instinct in it as well as in- 
telligence. We must bear in mind that the instinctive ele- 
ments are not so easily determinable as is the intellectual 
component. While we may be able to predict something 
from a knowledge of the intellectual capacity, we are rath- 
er hampered in. predicting character without a fuller 
knowledge of the instinctive forces and the degree of their 
development and control. 

Of course it would be ideal were it possible for the in- 
stincts to be constantly controlled by rational thinking, 
but man is not quite so rational a being at all times as he 
is wont to consider himself. That common sense, which 
has already been referred to, upon which the race prides 
itself, is called common sense largely because it is so un- 
common. 

There are great differences, then, in the mental en- 
dowment of individuals, whether children or adults. It is 
not all a question of knowledge. You may recall that story 
of the social worker down in the South who was doing 
child welfare work. She was going around about, and she 
finally came to an old colored woman who had had a large 
family. They were all living and they were all lively and 


TRAINING FOR CHARACTER 239 


happy, and this nurse asked the old colored woman how it 
happened that she had succeeded in raising this numerous 
progeny with such success, and with such eminent satis- 
faction apparently both to the children and to herself. 
The poor old mammy scratched her head a moment and 
then said, “Well, you see, I never went to college so I just 
naturally had to use my common sense.” Her accomplish- 
ments were not based upon an application to books, or to 
theoretic material which she had gathered from govern- 
ment pamphlets, or from other sources, but they were the 
result of a character in herself that followed out some of 
the instinctive traits of fine motherhood, combined with 
what she termed ‘‘common sense.” 

There is a great deal of difference between the capac- 
ity for organizing one’s experience and the willingness to 
organize it for the benefit of society. And character in- 
volves just as much a contemplation of the needs of soci- 
ety and one’s responsibility to society as it does the ele- 
ment that has been referred to as the capacity to organize 
experience. Desire and character are not wholly recipro- 
cal, and some of the outstanding men of history are those 
in whom character in one sense is not highly esteemed. 
Cellini, for example, was a strong character, very strong, 
and intellectual; but he did not organize his experience in 
the interests of the general community. Villon was a poet, 
a splendid poet, of ample intellectual capacity, but with 
little capacity for organizing in terms of social responsi- 
bility. Indeed, it seems to me that I have heard the char- 
acter of George Washington recently questioned; but 
think what his character would have been down the ages 
had the Revolutionary War been unsuccessful, and had he 
been merely a rebellious subject of George the Third! 


240 INTELLIGENT PARENTHOOD 


His character would not have been that which our history 
has given him. Hence, it is evident that the time, and the 
place, and the social demand help to determine both the 
character of character and the reputation for character. 
More or less, during the whole history of man, as Draper 
long ago pointed out, we find that the intellectual has al- 
ways led the way in social advancement, while the moral 
elements have constantly been subordinated to it. That 
held true during the Middle Ages, during the years of 
feudalism, and even during those delightful days of chiv- 
alry. The intellectual element ever has been a dominant 
one. That may be one of the factors that accounts for the 
general character as we have it today. The intellectual 
moiety has not been crystallized into social service and 
utility but has striven on a plane apart and has not func- 
tioned adequately for the production of moral standards 
of character. | | 

The instincts have long been regarded as playing a 
leading part in man’s slow progress, and I cannot but 
quote these lines of Huxley, written many years ago, in 
which there was a distinct note of optimism. He remarked, 
“The intelligence which has converted the brother of the 
wolf into the faithful guardian of the flock ought to be 
able to do something toward curbing the instincts of sav- 
agery in civilized man.” And Huxley saved himself by 
saying, “ought to,” because, thus far, it has not been suc- 
cessful. 

If one agrees with Jastrow that “moral education is 
the diversion of primitive energetic impulse into whole- 
some channels,” then we must question a great deal of the 
evolution of character as it has come down to us. 

I hesitate to speak of evolution in this age when fun- 


ee ee 


TRAINING FOR CHARACTER 241 


damentalist is warring against modernist, and so I will 
confine my remarks on that subject to a little quatrain in- 
dicating what evolution really means: 


“Evolution,” quoth the monkey, 
Makes all mankind our kin. fe ¥ 
There’s no doubt at all about it. © 
Tails we lost—heads we win.” 


In addition to a consideration of the instincts isolated 
or grouped, which enter into character, one must contem- 
plate the influence of the emotions. Dr. Neumann has re- 
ferred to them as at times handicapping the efficiency of 
fathers. The feelings which lead, guide, or disturb reason, 
or may even drive it out entirely and the feelings which 
are generated and goaded by reason, perform a star part 
in the play of character, irrespective of the intelligence of 
the person who has the feeling to control. Reason may 
reinforce or justify our decisions, but it does not as fre- 
quently inspire them as do our deeper emotions. 

It is the motor part of the emotion that dominates 
most of the vitality of character. Habits and training, 
therefore, are of notable worth. Lack of intellect pos- 
sesses negative rather than positive value. Frequently it 
is more difficult to instil desired habits in a child because 
of his active intelligence while it is easier for him to ac- 
quire other habits in greater harmony with his own 
desires. 

Some habits of speech are rapidly formed by children, 
especially in the use of language that is not taught through 
the subject of grammar. For proficiency in the use of ex- 
pletives one does not have to give courses running through 
the grades. | 


Q42 INTELLIGENT PARENTHOOD 


Habits are in many ways dependent upon intelligence, 
but let us remember that intelligence also more easily per- 
mits or even leads to the shifting of habits to meet the de- 
mands of impulses, and to meet the demands of new mo- 
tives in life. Intelligence inspires the methods by which 
habits are established rather than the motive for their 
establishment. Both intelligence and habits are requisite 
for social adaptation. | 

When one speaks of habits of learning and memoriz- 
ing, one must remember the facility with which children 
explain away their losses of memory. A short time ago a 
little girl had been invited to play at a musicale given by 
her music teacher, and she sat down to the piano. She had 
two pieces to play and she played the first very, very 
badly, getting the first part mixed with the second. After 
that she played the second selection, and not even as well 
as the’previous one. After it was over the teacher said, 
“Now, how did you happen to play those quite the way 
that you did? I have heard you play them better.” The 
child replied, “The first one I had so long ago that I had 
forgotten it, and the second one I have not had long 
enough to remember yet.” 

As we discuss character, let us remember that we, 
ourselves, are altering values as to the essential desirable 
traits of character. With all the intellectual capacity 
of the Greeks they treated their aged shamefully and 
negligently, whereas the North American Indian, without 
such claims to intellectual life and activity, reverenced 
their old people. “One may recognize the distinction be- 
tween a religion and character code founded upon ances- 
tor worship, and one that has not hesitated to do away 
with the older generation in order to make it easier for 


TRAINING FOR CHARACTER 243 


the tribe to march. Our social restraints and our require- 
ments are ever changing our activities and at the same 
time shifting and readjusting our standards of behavior. 
The moral ideas of an age form part of the social ideas of 
that age. The validity of our ideas of character can only 
be interpreted in terms of our social conditions, social ac- 
ceptances, and our social taboos. The standards of char- 
acter during a time of war are not the standards of a time 
of peace. To steal during peace time is to bring oppro- 
brium, but to steal during war times, if it be the plans of . 
the enemy, brings credit for the attributes of courage, 
valor, and daring. Lying and spying in time of war are 
rewarded, but lying and espionage during times of peace 
are considered reprehensible. 

We hear much nervous comment concerning the char- 
acter of the youth of today. The character of youth of to- 
day is no different from the character of those whose youth 
must be mentioned in a past tense. I recall an enlighten- 
ing little experience which is fraught with a significant 
message. A man was complaining to me about his daughter 
and objected that times had changed. He said, “I recall 
the time when my dear mother was an old lady, and there 
was a chair which was her chair. No child would think of 
sitting in that particular chair. At night after supper ev- 
ery one including the grandchildren, would remain stand- 
ing until she had sat down. Then the young folks, one 
after the other, would talk to her and tell her where they 
were going, and what time they expected to return, they 
expressed the hope that she would have a good night’s 
rest, and quite naturally added that they would tell her all 
about it in the morning.” I could endure no more. “See 
here,” I said, “if you will show me grandmothers sitting 


Q44 INTELLIGENT PARENTHOOD 


around like that, I’ll show you grandchildren doing the 
same sort of thing!”’ 

Youth has not changed any more than age has 
changed, except to this extent—the old have grown young- 
er, and the young have grown older. As a result we have a 
different conflict, because the old who have grown younger 
are thinking in terms of their youth when they were still 
younger, and much younger than the generation that is 
slowly aging before them. 

Sometimes we talk about how we used to sit at home 
at night and read. Of course we did—there were few 
places of pleasure to visit. We usually came home early. 
Of course, the trolleys stopped running at eleven or twelve, 
and there were no taxis. We tell of how we never did this 
or that—we speak less often of what we did do. Had we 
had the good fortune to be born when our children were 
born we would in all likelihood be just like them. They 
have the same blood, the same impulses, emotions, and de- 
sires that we had, but they are living in a different world, 
with different opportunities for their realization, with dif- 
ferent traditions, altered customs and mores. They were 
exposed to the blight of a war situation which helped 
break down countless barriers that formerly were held in 
respect. They are living in a time when women have the 
vote, when the industrialism of women is more complete 
than ever before, when there is more mechanization of life, 
when most of the educative values have gone out of the 
home, not always excepting the parents. We have taken 
the raw materials of life, from an educational standpoint, 
out of the home. Indeed in many homes it is deemed haz- 
ardous for the child to undertake practical household arts 


TRAINING FOR CHARACTER 245 


because the cook or the chambermaid does not like it, and 
it is easier to deny the children than the cook or maid. 

Let us be fair. Our characters have changed because 
our conditions have changed. We were not brought up in 
an age of cinemas and speedy automobiles, of telephones 
and easy date-making. We were subjected to a less elabo- 
rate system of education and a less vigorous compulsory 
educational law. What we face at the present time is a 
stage of transition and adaptation of youth to a world that 
it does not understand; and parents do not understand 
youth or the world either. Undoubtedly there are dan- 
gers, but let us not lose faith because character seems to 
be changing in some ways. The plaints of today were not 
unknown in the days of Isaiah; and they have been called 
out from time immemorial at repeated intervals when new 
institutions have arisen and have changed the standards 
and customs of the age. There is a danger, it is true, that 
some of the new experiences, this new freedom, with new 
access to a larger and more unrestrained literature which 
is swallowed undigested, may give rise to a little mental 
dyspepsia. There may be a temporary reaction of seeming 
enjoyment, but I have no doubt that another change will 
occur when the novelty has worn off. In the words of a 
nineteen-year old girl, “I wonder what the next genera- 
tion can do?” 

Since we are talking in terms of intelligence, has this 
present age more intelligence? No! Yes! Depending up- 
on how you look at it. The younger generation has no less 
intelligence than their parents; and yet we are trying to 
point out distinctions in character and at the time en- 
deavoring to maintain the thesis that intelligence is the 
main element in character. The real strength of character 


246 INTELLIGENT PARENTHOOD 


is in the present youth! They have courage; they have ini- 
tiative; they have strength. They ring true; they speak 
the truth, fearlessly, and painfully at times to their par- 
ents. They know what they want better than the earlier 
generation did, because they are doing their own thinking. 
Their thoughts as to who they are, what they are, and 
what they are to be are not merely the acceptance of the 
gracious advice of their elders. There is a herd conscious- 
ness in youth that recognizes its place; and so we wit- 
ness a youth movement spreading throughout the various 
countries of the globe. 

But man is more of an individual and is more honest 
as an individual when he protests than when he conforms. 
Only a simple unreasoning nature accepts everything that 
the world says as a 100 per cent true, but an intelligent 
thinking being challenges it and applies cold, merciless 
logic to it. Thus we find ourselves doubting youths’ char- 
acter because they are doubting. Youth shows character 
because it is questioning. A finer and a more vigorous 
strength of character arises when a man’s thoughts and 
his actions are in accordance with his intellectual proc- 
esses ; when he thinks before he accepts, rather than after. 

There may be fewer young people joining some good 
movement; there may be some difficulty in getting them 
into the church; there may be some friction in converting 


them to many of our ideas, but they will make a church of © 


their own which will meet their needs and demands. The 
great problem confronting the church today is how to 
make our church traditions conform to the desires and the 
needs of an altered age and generation. But the churches 
are slowly making the requisite changes. Youth is consid- 
ering churchliness in the sense of the brotherhood of man, 


TRAINING FOR CHARACTER Q47 


and through that they are gaining some idea of the father- 
hood of God; and it is not merely an intuition, or a re- 
peated dogma. 

Let us for a moment recognize, then, that individual 
character is somewhat determined by the collective actions 
of communities, and that these collective actions are em- 
bodied in codes and standards, rules, customs, and mores. 
When these social dicta are accepted intellectually, then 
they become our ideals; and our ideals are intellectual ab- 
stractions of which we approve, even though we do not 
always follow them. 

There are many who believe that most of the prob- 
lems relating to character-development have arisen from 
a failure of our educational system, because they think 
that ethics ought to be developed through a direct appeal 
to the intelligence. For example, we have been having 
considerable discussion in New York City as to whether 
the Ten Commandments should be read in school. I think 
it makes no difference. The Ten Commandments have 
been well advertised and preached for a number of gen- 
erations. They have not all been followed, although the 
intellectual appeal has not been lacking. There has 
been ample evidence of personal indifference, and so- 
cial violations have hampered their realization, although 
they are accepted as representing one of the finest codes 
of moral practice extant. Possibly Sumner was right when 
he said, “Our faith in the power of book learning is exces- 
sive and unfounded. It is a superstition of the age.” I~ 
hesitate to support this view before an educated commu- 
nity believing in the infinite worth of formal education; 
_ but there is a question as to how far and how much of 
character can be formed and developed through sheer 


Q48 INTELLIGENT PARENTHOOD 


book influence. Book learning proj ected toward the intel- 
lect alone does not become as fully organized in the being 
of youth as does the learning that comes through the regu- 
lation of emotions, and through the establishment of ade- 
quate powers of self-direction and control in and through 
socialized activity and effortful living. 

I regret to say that the same Dr. Murchison, whom I 
previously quoted, found from a study of prisoners that 
“there seems to be a positive correlation between the 
amount of literacy and the amount of recidivism.” In a 
comparison of the second-, third-, fourth-, fifth-, and 
sixth-term offenders in the prison, he found a higher de- 
gree of intelligence than among those who were only first 
offenders. That observation carries its own sad moral. 
But it is significant in another direction, that the federal 
prisoners at Fort Leavenworth during the war, as a group, 
had a higher intelligence grade than was found among the 
draftees. That, too, may carry its lesson, considering that 
so large a proportion of the prisoners were conscientious 
objectors and pacifists. It is striking (and it is almost 
humorous) that in one prison at least, where examinations 
were made, the intelligence of the prisoners was found to 
be higher than that of their guards. When it comes to 
feeble-mindedness, Dr. Burt, in his study of delinquents, 
found that even feeble-minded delinquents have a higher 
 ntellectual level than the feeble-minded who are not de- 
linquent. Now all of these interesting statements are 
simply indicative of what I implied when referring to Dr. 
Goddard’s figures, that interpretation depends on those 
you are examining, and where you are examining them. 

Intelligence occupies an anomalous position because 
we tend to worship it; we give it values that are actually 


TRAINING FOR CHARACTER 249 


greater than those to which it is entitled, particularly in 
our social relationships. If direct education is not of im- 
mense value, what can we do? A large part of character - 
is the result of training. Character is both an end in life 
and a goal in the training of children, and, curiously 
enough, I believe that most of it is obtained as a by- 
product of education. It is gained more through objective 
opportunities and experience than from subjective ap- 
peals and sermonizing comments. It is an acquirement in 
the course of life and in the course of living, rather than 
the result of a primary natural endowment. If we seek to 
develop character, it is necessary for us to find means 
whereby we can enable individuals to regulate their in- 
stincts and to give adequate guidance to their emotions 
through deliberate experience. We must aim to secure and 
present opportunities for developing right habits and for 
bringing about an effective motivation so that right habits 
may be desired and cultivated. 

Intelligence really gets its best chance to function 
and control action when our instincts, feelings, and habits 
are inadequate to meet situations. “The intellectual factor 
fixes and rallies maturing attitudes and systems,” as Jas- 
trow states, and brings about “the moral regulation of 
trends and desires.” 

I think that a high degree of character-development 
does not come through a direct appeal to the intelligence, 
but results from what Dr. Cabot terms, entering the mind 
by the back door, that is, by suggestion. The suggestion 
that goes to formulate character is often far more efficient 
than the direct intellectual appeal. “Our ideas and our 
beliefs, our ethics and religion, our arts, science and poli- 
tics are through suggestibility,” writes Professor Martin. 


250 INTELLIGENT PARENTHOOD 


And further, “Child morality and adult morality too, for 
that matter, is much more a matter of suggestion than of a 
reasoned conduct.” If he is correct, possibly one can un- 
derstand the Englishman’s explanation of why America, 
after applauding Mr. Wilson’s Fourteen Points, rejected 
the treaty he helped consummate. It illustrates how, with 
all our high ideals, we often fail to act quite in accord 
with them. Said he, “An experience of mine makes it quite 
clear. I was motoring along a road near Chicago, and 
suddenly I saw a sign painted on a huge rock admonish- 
ing us: ‘Prepare to meet thy God.’ I thought it was a 
very noble spiritual appeal. While reflecting upon its 
message I was stunned to note, only a bit farther along 
the road another and an equally large sign, bidding us 
‘Detour.’ Much of our travel along the road of character 
training is met by detours.” 

Intelligence can function, and it does function, but it 
functions best in establishing our ideals and in formulat- 
ing our abstract principles. It is not, however, the fun- 
damental, basic factor in character-formation. Ellwood 
maintains: ‘Intelligence in a form of social imagination 
must lead the way.” Thus we can foster the development 
of such intellectual approaches as may be of greater avail 
to us in molding, stimulating, or inhibiting character as 
occasion demands. Our ideals are intellectual ends toward 
which social practice must tend and they must lead the 
way. The fundamentals of character are truth and justice 
and a sense of their value and relationship in man’s deal- 
ings with man. They require organization into the organic 
being of the present and future generation. And this is no 
light task. 


TRAINING FOR CHARACTER 251 


After all, character still harks back to ancient direc- 
tions and goals. The essence of character that we are 
seeking today, whether we attempt to secure it through 
intellectual activity or indirect suggestion, is found in the 
words of the prophet Micah, “To do justly, and to love 
mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God.” To this we 
need but add the wealth of the Golden Rule.: “Do unto 
others as you would that others should do unto you.” 







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THE CHILD, THE HOME, AND 
THE SCHOOL 


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THE PRESCHOOL CHILD AND THE 
PRESENT-DAY PARENT 


Dr. Arnold Gesell, Director, Yale Psycho-Clinic, Yale University 


The child of preschool age is being rediscovered. He 
has existed as long as the race has existed; but his great 
importance in the scheme of things is rising into bold and 
arresting prominence. He has become in his way a social 
problem. It is as though he had suddenly acquired some 
magnetic power which compels us to look in his direction. 

He is the focus of attention from many quarters. He 
has a new status in social planning, in public health, even 
in science. He has recently been the subject of long de- 
bate in the British Parliament, and he is, of course, re- 
sponsible for this Mid-West Conference on Parent Edu- 
cation. 

The total size of the preschool population of the 
United State is large enough. There are some thirteen 
millions of children who have not yet cut their sixth-year 
molars. This number is not much less than the entire en- . 
rollment of the elementary schools of the country. 


THE SOCIAL IMPORTANCE OF THE PRESCHOOL AGE 


We are scarcely aware of the great size of this pre- 
school army because the army is a very scattered one, 
and it never assembles to make a show of its numerical 
strength. These preschool children are now in cradles and 
perambulators, or they are making brave excursions on 
their runabout kiddy-kars, in the nursery, in the back 
yard, or on the front sidewalk. One in nine of eligible age 


255 


256 INTELLIGENT PARENTHOOD 


may attend a kindergarten. A small fraction come under 
the auspices of infant welfare or a health center. It is 
when a fairly large group are assembled at some busy con- 
sultation center that we are most conscious of the social 
importance of the infant. 

In a few years all the survivors of this large army 
will by virtue of legal age come within the scope of com- 
pulsory public education ; but while they are of preschool 
age, children come only partially and sketchily within the 
sphere of social control. The social status of the preschool 
child of today is somewhat like that of the school child of 
a century ago, before the time of public education, medical 
school inspection and protective legislation. The mental 
and physical welfare of the preschool children of today is 
quite at the mercy of the multitude of individual homes in 
which these children are distributed. The developmental 
opportunities of the preschool child hinge on the fathers 
and mothers who make or mar these homes. His fortunes 
depend on his parents. 

The rediscovery of the preschool child, therefore, has 
resulted in the discovery of his parents. We may say that 
the parent, too, has become something of a social problem. 
Indeed, we are beginning to reformulate the problem of 
the hygiene of the preschool child in terms of parent edu- 
cation and parent guidance. Although the development of 
the preschool child must be brought more systematically 
under the control of society, that control should be achieved 
indirectly through his parents. Indeed, in a certain sense 
the preschool child, as such, scarcely exists. His mental 
life and physical growth are so profoundly dependent up- 
on the parents who gave him the first impulse to life and 
growth that it is almost impossible to study his nature and 


CHILD, HOME, AND SCHOOL Q57 


needs except in terms of the parent-child relation. Our 
plans and our dreams with respect to the preschool child 
of today and tomorrow must reckon at every turn with the 
parent. There will be no sociological short cut. We can- 
not congregate the embryo members of the body politic 
into state nurseries. We can deal with infancy only 
through individuals and through individual homes. 

The problem of parent education is a concrete prob- 
lem which can be approached through social methods with 
which we are already somewhat familiar. There is little 
danger that a social interest in this whole problem will 
‘diminish either parental interest or parental responsibil- 
ity. In fact, the whole tide of the present movement is in 
the contrary direction. The new premium which is placed 
upon the importance of the preschool years of childhood 
has already heightened the importance of the task of 
parenthood. 

Here a word may be said about the present-day status 
of family life in America. There are many distressing and 
disquieting signs of instability. The shocking rise in mari- 
tal divorce cannot, however, be construed as a decline 
of interest in young children. It means too many other 
things. Even the declining birth-rate has a compensation 
in the higher premium it places on every surviving new- 
born infant. The birth-rate in superior family strains is 
falling too low, but infant life is really not held as cheap 
as in the earlier days of excessive infant and maternal 
death-rates. 

The youth and the young married couples of today 
are perhaps even a little more cognizant of the meaning 
of parenthood than were any preceding generation. There 
is no evidence whatever that child life is falling into lower 


258 INTELLIGENT PARENTHOOD 


esteem. In fact, the evidence is just the other way. We 
hear too little of the unnumbered unheralded homes, where 
wholesome young people are eagerly seeking every, pos- 
sible guide to help them rear their young child aright. 
They are ready for more guidance than society is pre- 
pared to give. The present-day movement in behalf of the 
preschool child, as a popular movement, is both a symp- 
tom and a cause. Through it the young parents of the 
country are becoming articulate. This movement will 
doubtless grow and ramify until parent, child, and com- 
munity will come into multiplying relations which will 
make the home of the future richer and stronger than it 
ever was in the past. By a better home, I mean one in 
which the preschool child will have a greater opportunity 
to attain full stature of mind and body. 

What are the chances for such full stature today? 
They are not the best. One-third of all the deaths of the 
nation occur below the age of six years. There are ten 
times as many deaths during the half-decade of preschool 
life as during the following decades of school life. Most 
of the common physical defects of school children like 
malnutrition and nose and throat defects are more preva- 
lent among preschool children than among school children. 
Rickets, a disorder of nutrition, is almost as common as 
dental caries and is essentially a preschool disease. 

Practically every case of mental deficiency dates back 
to birth or early childhood. Three-fourths of all the deaf, 
a considerable portion of all the blind, one-third of all the 
crippled, and over three-fourths of all the speech defec- 
tives come to their handicap during their preschool period. 
Many conduct disorders and defects of behavior take 
shape in this same period. 


CHILD, HOME, AND SCHOOL 259 


INFANCY AND PREVENTIVE MENTAL HYGIENE 


All told the preschool age is the most fundamental, 
the most formative, the most precarious portion of the 
whole life-cycle. If we wish to increase the physical stam- 
ina of the nation, we must begin at the bottom, safeguard 
the physical growth of the child from infancy, and make 
the health protection of the preschool child as universal 
as public elementary education. If we wish to increase the 
mental stamina of the nation and cut down the stupendous 
load of insanity, crime, nervous and mental defect, we 
must strike near the root and institute preventive meas- 
ures of mental hygiene in the earliest years of life. 

The necessity of a far-reaching and basic program of 
mental hygiene is increasingly apparent. The expense of 
caring for the mentally disordered, the mentally incom- 
petent, the delinquent, and the dependent is becoming the 
greatest single item on the budget of each state. There are 
more beds for nervous and mental illness in the United 
States than all the ordinary hospital beds of the country 
put together. Every seventh person in New York state 
dies in a hospital for the insane. About a half-million de- 
linquents annually pass through our courts and peniten- 
tiaries. The reduction at the root of at least the preventa- 
ble portion of all this tragic wastage of humanity is so im- 
portant that we must begin to think of the task in terms of 
childhood and even of infancy. 

Civilization will bend under its own weight unless it 
finds means of strengthening the psychological stamina 
of succeeding generations. Science is beginning to feel 
the spur of this danger. Science created the mechanical 
features of our civilization. Science now has a new task: 


260 INTELLIGENT PARENTHOOD 


to investigate the human mind which is creator and carrier 
of this complicated culture. In the language of B.L.T., 
who and what is this so-called human being? 

Biology is studying the racial origins and basic mech- 
anisms of this human being. Anthropology is studying the 
meaning of his multiform manners and customs. Psychi- 
atry is studying his aberrations, his frailities, his tragic 
and near tragic failures to adjust to his fellow-men. Psy- 
chology is studying the characteristic and conditions of 
his normal development from infancy to maturity. 

This is a new kind of science which is taking shape; 
it is nothing less than a conscious effort on the part of the 
race to understand itself. We cannot leave the mysteries 
of the human mind to the speculations of the philosopher. 
We shall always need philosophy, and art, and religion; 
but in addition we need an understanding of the laws of 
human behavior. These laws will not be ascertained by 
self-revelation. They must be studied with the zeal of the 
physicist in his pursuit of the atom and electron. 

The human mind is part of the order of nature. It 
therefore behaves according to laws. It grows not unlike 
a plant, subject to inherent limitations, to habitat and 
stimulation. In spite of individual variations, infant, 
youth, and adult behave according to general laws of hu- 
man nature. These laws will some day be formulated with 
such precision that they can be used to predict and to con- 
trol human nature. 


THE SOCIAL SIGNIFICANCE OF PARENT EDUCATION 
This is the faith behind the mental hygiene movement. 

It is the faith behind the nation-wide movement for parent 

education. Every intelligent parent knows that the men- 


CHILD, HOME, AND SCHOOL 261 


tal growth of the young child is not blindly fore-ordained 
but will be responsive to the atmosphere and the proce- 
dures of the home. Public health leaders and educators 
alike realize that if we are to safeguard early mental 
growth, society must systematically institute measures of 
parental guidance and of preparental education. 

How can this be done? 

1. By incorporating courses in child development 
and child care into the home economics instruction of 
youths in high school and college. In time these courses 
should frankly become courses in preparental education. 
It is futile to side step the issues of home life and the diffi- 
culties of rearing children by maintaining a squeamish 
policy of silence in the public schools. 

2. By developing centers of parental training, in con- 
nection with kindergartens and nursery schools. Preschool 
education should be cautiously extended through the kin- 
dergarten and otherwise; but not so much for its own sake 
as for the sake of the parents of the preschool children. 
The great objective should be to assist the home and the 
parent, not to displace them. 

3. By instituting periodic developmental examina- 
tions from infancy to school entrance. These examinations 
can be made through an anticipatory downward extension 
of medical school inspection, through health centers and 
preschool clinics, but best of all through the upward ex- 
tension of the infant consultation center. 


SOCIAL MEASURES FOR DEVELOPMENTAL SUPERVISION 
OF PRESCHOOL CHILDREN 
Our goal should be a continuous periodic develop- 
mental supervision from the prenatal period to the pri- 


262 INTELLIGENT PARENTHOOD 


mary school. Through family physician and through con- 
sultation centers this goal can be reached. The develop- 
mental supervision must be comprehensive enough to in- 
clude both mind and physique. Nutrition is basic, but it is 
the point of departure for a periodic survey of the child’s 
total economy, his psychological as well as physical. 

Mental hygiene as a branch of social medicine will 
rest upon a developmental supervision of this type. Such 
a supervision will be sufficiently timely to nip many men- 
tal abnormalities in the bud. It will be sufficiently con- 
structive to strengthen what is normal and sound. It will 
place such a premium upon mental health in both parent 
and child, that we may look for a great ultimate increase 
in the psychological stamina of the population. What med- 
ical science has accomplished in the reduction of infant 
mortality makes us confident in the possibilities of preven- 
tive mental hygiene. 

The first infant consultation center was established 
in France just a generation ago. It has flourished like a 
mustard seed and spread the world over. It has not yet 
become as universal as the public elementary school, but 
it promises a similar destiny. The time is rapidly ap- 
proaching when the developmental opportunities of pre- 
school children will be as democratically safeguarded as 
those of school children. In this developmental sense, 
through direct assistance of the responsible parent, the 
preschool period is coming under social control. 

Fortunately this goal can be achieved in a non- 
autocratic way, through co-operative and educational ap- 
proaches, which will stimulate rather than weaken the re- 
sponsibilities of parenthood. 


CHILD, HOME, AND SCHOOL 263 


On the practical side, therefore, the problem is to de- 
velop the same solicitude for mental growth which we 
have begun to show for physical growth. The intelligent 
parent of today carefully follows the physical growth 
curve of the young child as indicated by inches and pounds. 
She wants her child to make consistent gains and to reach 
certain standards. Although mental growth cannot be 
measured with the same precision, it is equally desirable 
that we should have behavior standards or educational 
standards which will serve a similar purpose and help us 
to keep the child up to a maximum level of mental devel- 
opment. No programs for developmental supervision can 
operate without working standards. 

It is not that we wish to standardize the children, but 
rather that we must define methods which can be applied. 


YALE STUDIES OF EARLY MENTAL GROWTH. 


The Yale Psycho-Clinic has for several years been in- 
terested in this problem of standards of mental growth in 
children of preschool age. Accordingly we have made a 
series of studies of some five hundred normal children at 
ten ascending levels of their development—at one, four, 
six, nine, twelve, and eighteen months and at two, three, 
four, and five years. Fifty children were studied at each 
of these levels to determine their significant characteris- 
tics with respect to motor ability, language, general intel- 
ligent behavior, and personal social behavior. 

This investigation has furnished us with an outline of 
the progressive stages of normal mental development, and 
given us some preliminary conception of what a child 
“ought” to be at these stages. 


264 INTELLIGENT PARENTHOOD 


Through a series of motion pictures* we have recorded 
certain phases of our study of preschool children, designed 
to show both the scientific and practical significance of 
the earliest stages of growth. The infant’s mental growth 
is so swift, so elusive, and withal so familiar, that its true 
wonder tends to escape us. This film is probably unique 
in the youthfulness of the principals who enact the drama. 
The youngest subject is just one month of age; others are 
four, six, nine, twelve, eighteen months, and two, three, 
four, and five years of age. These children appear on the 
screen in the order of their ages; and thus the spectator 
gets a sequence of cross-sectional views, which build up a 
cumulative impression of the speed and richness of devel- 
opment in infancy. 

The mind does not prove to be too intangible for rep- 
resentation on the screen. The psychologist through his 
observations and experiments studies the mental factor by 
recording and measuring the objective behavior. This mo- 
tion picture is a record of the behavior of normal children 
in various situations which portray their psychological 
maturity and capacity. Nearly all the pictures are close- 
ups and reveal the details of the child’s characteristic re- 
actions to the psychological test situations which are used 
to measure his development. | 

The one-month-old babe blinks but cannot even hold 
up his head; the four-months old babe gazes at a one-inch 

1A motion picture dealing with the mental growth of the 
preschool child was shown at the Mid-West Conference meeting. 
This picture was made at Yale University with the co-operation 
of the Pathé Exchange. The subject matter of the picture is 
briefly described (see also Vol. 121, No. 210, of the Annals of 


the American Academy of Political and Social Science, Philadel- 
‘phia, 1925). 


CHILD, HOME, AND SCHOOL 265 


cubical block placed before him but fails to pick it up; the 
six-month-old infant seizes the block with executive di- 
rectness and puts it to the mouth; the nine-month infant 
bangs it against a cup in combining play; the year-old 
subject unwraps it from a paper covering; the eighteen- 
months youngster stands on his own feet and builds a tall 
tower of blocks; the two-year-old assembles a pile of 
blocks with deftness; the three-year-old builds a bridge 
of them; the four-year-old, a more difficult gate; and the 
five-year-old caps the climax by reproducing from mem- 
ory a complicated stairway model presented by the ex- 
aminer. And so the reactions to the building blocks fur- 
nish a cinema summary of the child’s mental growth. 
These reactions and many others have been studied in 
several hundreds of children at the Yale Psycho-Clinic 
and have been standardized into behavior norms for de- 
velopmental diagnosis. 

The cinema shows the subjects responding to vari- 
ous psychological tests. A vigorous nine-month-old baby 
spends a tantalizing minute on the screen in a persistent 
and finally successful attempt to pick up a pellet with a 
fine pincer-like prehension. A year-old-boy places a block 
in a form board. A four-year-old captures a psychological 
fish in a motor co-ordination test. 

One of the chapters in the film is entitled, ““The Evo- 
lution of Man.” This is a graded series of children’s draw- 
ings, which are projected on the screen in dissolving se- 
quence and show the ascent of man from a primitive scrib- 
ble to a boldly executed kindergarten creation of the 
human form. 
| The motion pictures were made in the psycho-clinical 
laboratory. The mothers co-operated at every turn, and it 


266 INTELLIGENT PARENTHOOD 


was found that the children were neither frightened nor 
distracted by the grinding camera. The youngest infants 
were blissfully unaware, and the older ones were too in- 
terested in the psychological test situations to do anything 
but attend to the task in hand. 

Although these reels were the outgrowth of a scien- 
tific research, the scenario includes glimpses of the prac- 
tical work of a psychological clinic and of a baby welfare 
station, and indicate the importance of keeping the total 
development of young children under systematic super- 
vision. 

The cinema cannot, of course, make the psychic es- 
sence of the mind visible on the screen. It serves, how- 
ever, to sharpen our perception for the psychology of in- 
fancy, and to inform our faith in the dynamic importance 
of early growth and education. 

A concluding section of the picture suggests the stra- 
tegic social position of the public school in the hygiene 
of the preschool child and the education of parents. The 
lively front entrance of a public school building on an in- 
fant welfare conference afternoon is pictured. The con- 
ference for well babies is going on in the basement of the 
building. A dozen baby carriages, with mothers and the 
public health nurse are visible. Perhaps there is a grand- 
mother in the group. On the margins are interested kin- 
dergarten and primary-school children. Within the build- 
ing is a class of white-capped grammar school girls at the 
cooking ranges of the home economics course. Here we 
have in juxtaposition various levels of two or three genera- 
tions. Here we glimpse the meaning of the infant as the 
potential school beginner, of the adolescent as a potential 
parent, of the adult who must share with the public school 
the task of early education. 


THE INFLUENCE OF THE PARENT AND 
TEACHER ON THE INTELLECTUAL 
DEVELOPMENT OF SCHOOL 
CHILDREN 
Walter F. Dearborn, Graduate School of Education, 
Harvard University 

With the advent of intelligence tests and their in- 
creasing use in the schools, there has also been promul- 
gated a notion, unfortunate in its consequences, of a fixed 
intellectual endowment, with which a child is born, which 
neither he nor his parent can by taking thought alter, and 
which the intelligence tests are chiefly designed to meas- 
ure. I wish to make clear that, on the contrary, what the 
intelligence tests measure is definitely effected for better 
or worse, that it is increased or decreased, by what the 
home and the school, or the parent and the teacher, do for 
their children and pupils. 

The cultural anthropologist and psychologist, as con- 
trasted with those who believe in the prepondering influ- 
ence of that which is instinctive, inborn, or inherited in 
shaping the destinies of man, are insisting with renewed 
vigor on this recent emergence of the old problem of na- 
ture versus nurture, that the intelligence tester is over- 
stating nature’s case. Professor Boaz has recently pointed 
out that although there are evidently marked anatomical 
differences between men, different individuals may be- 
come adjusted to the same demands. 

The healthy individual without harm to his body may 
at one time be a vegeterian and at another time may live 

267 


— 268 INTELLIGENT PARENTHOOD 


on an exclusive meat diet. He may live a lazy life at the 
level of the sea, or subject himself to strenuous exercise 
in high altitudes. There are limits to adaptability that de- 
pend on the soundness of the organism, but within wide 
limits of external conditions an optimum of efficiency may 
be maintained. 

There is a “margin of safety which exists for all or- 
ganisms.” So, given the environmental demand or, as the 
psychologists like to say, “stimulus,” the same individual, 
the same family strain, and the same race may show a 
wide range of intellectual functioning. With such con- 
siderations in mind, we may well be cautious in prophesy- 
ing the limits of individual, family, or race achievement. 
Yet this is in fact what the intelligence tester has been at- 
tempting to do. 

Psychologists have at times in their discussions all 
but assumed, and the pseudo-psychologists have assumed, 
that the individual’s limitations were due solely to intel- 
lectual endowment which he inherits, and that the intelli- 
gence test measures solely this hereditary endowment or 
native intelligence. But no one has succeeded in sepa- 
rating these factors, and the intelligence test measures 
the composite result. Some of these factors may be under 
control in a given case and others may not. Even such a 
conservative statement as the following from a recent 
book errs in regarding endowment as the one factor iso- 
lated by the tests. 

Much of the opposition to psychological tests is 
founded upon an emotional reaction against the idea that 
human limitations can be declared. Once this possibility 
is admitted, everyone feels that his privacy is invaded. 


Each one makes a personal application and is alarmed 
at the thought that his secret inferiorities may now be 


CHILD, HOME, AND SCHOOL 269 


published to the world. Evidence of this is the stereo- 
typed retort: “I’m sure.I couldn’t pass the eight-year-old 
test myself; I should turn out to be an imbecile.” Grow- 
ing out of this personal reaction is the more altruistic but 
no less violent revolt against the mere suggestion that ev- 
ery human being does not hold infinite possibilities. We 
like to believe that every child, given a proper environ- 
ment, may turn out to be a genius. 

Yet when we face the problem with scientific candor, 
we are obliged to admit that only two alternatives exist. 
Either everybody is born with the same intellectual poten- 
tialities or not. Either everybody is equally endowed or 
differently endowed. Those of us who believe in psycho- 
logical tests feel that, however crude and inadequate our 
present methods may be we have at least at our command 
a means of discovering the grosser differences in intellec- 
tual endowment in early childhood.* 


But the shoe fits quite as well on the other foot and 
we may then say that what the intelligence test does is to 
anticipate or foresee what the school and society is going 
to do to the individual in the course of time. So long as 
the school and society remain as they are, this prevision 
is possible in a great many cases and is very useful. 
Teachers’ judgments, marks, and examination grades 
also share in this distinction and service. The tests and 
teachers predict what the individual is likely to learn 
from what he has already learned. In how far the previ- 
ous learning, which is the basis of prediction, is due to 
faulty and limiting habit and in how far to limited endow- 
ment is a matter of conjecture. Here no more than else- 
where can we separate nature from nurture; intellect 


1 Quoted from Irwin and Marks: “Fitting the School to the 
Child.” ‘ 


270 INTELLIGENT PARENTHOOD 


from culture; neither the body nor the mind develops in 
vacuo. 

What schooling and a cultured home can do by way 
of improving the intelligence, as tested, is best illustrated 
by the contrast presented by the lack of these influences. 
Particularly impressive in this respect is Gordon’s study 
of the English canal boat children. These children re- 
ceive little or no schooling, their average attendance at 
school being estimated at only 4 or 5 per cent of the 
school year, and their social contacts and intellectual life, 
as judged by ordinary standards, are most limited. Their 
parents are for the most part illiterate. On the other 
hand, “In respect to health, cleanliness, morality, feed- 
ing, etc., they are fully equal if not superior, to town 
dwellers of a similar character.” That these children are 
not mentally defective, in the ordinary sense of the term, 
is amply shown by various observations and by the life 
and wages of their parents. 

Gordon found that canal boat children of six years of 
age were, by test, of normal intelligence, their I.Q.’s 
ranging from 90 to 100, whereas the seven-year-olds had 
-1.Q.’s averaging between 80 and 90, the eight-year-olds 
between 70 and 80, and the children of nine years of age, 
with one exception, had I.Q.’s below 70. In other words, 
if judged by the result of the test alone, the nine-year- 
olds would be rated as feeble-minded. 

There seems but one possible explanation of these 
findings: The reason the younger children do better in 
the Binet tests is that success, in the tests for the very 
early years, does not depend upon schooling and but little 
on the ordinary cultural environment, and the failure of 
the older children is largely due to the fact that the tests 


CHILD, HOME, AND SCHOOL Q71 


for the higher ages do require some schooling and some 
culture. Another factor which makes for differences in 
the intellectual status of children at any given time is the 
differing rates of maturing. This is also a factor which is 
affected by environmental influences, and not solely a 
matter of innate determination. 

Severe illness and social isolation may sometimes ac- 
count for retarded development; a process of “hot hous- 
ing’ which is sometimes resorted to by overambitious par- 
ents may produce at least temporary acceleration in de- 
velopment. In others the cause appears to be inherent. 
As Cyril Burt has said in speaking of children whose 
growth has been retarded: 

Such children are creatures of deferred maturity. 
Their development is not arrested; it has been postponed. 
Although on a lower plane, their mental phenomenon is 
more familiar. There is many a sharp child whose cycle 
of growth is like that of the mulberry tree, presenting first 
a long delay, and then a sudden yield of flower and fruit 
together. Their existence is recognized in the double 
scholarship examination. In London at the age of thirteen 
a second examination has been instituted specifically for 
those who in the current phrase ‘“‘bloom late,” and whose 
anticipated powers, therefore, do not ripen by the age of 
ten. In like fashion, among classes of defectives, time and 


due season will here and there disclose a sporadic “‘school 
autumnal!’ 


On the other hand, some of our much heralded prodi- 
gies, who have rather petered out in later years, may 
prove to have maintained their relative superiority for a 
few years because of early maturing, supplemented by a 
kind of hot-housing. What some parents attempt to do and 
occasionally succeed in doing for a time with the common 


272 INTELLIGENT PARENTHOOD 


garden variety of intellect gives pause to the enthusiasm 
of the most ardent cultural anthropologist or psycholo- 
gist. Such parents, it must be said, frequently pass the 
bounds or “margins of safety” which nature has set for 
its children. When one meets these overambitious parents 
and their rank and weedy offspring, he is inclined to write 
a chapter on “What Children Ought to Know about the 
Intelligence of Their Parents.”’ 

A third source or cause of error in judging intelligence 
is the failure to recognize that there are different kinds of 
intelligence and that the schools prefer almost exclusively 
one kind of intelligence to the detriment of those who do 
not possess it, or have not cultivated it. I wish to review 
with you a few indications of the preponderance in pres- 
ent-day schooling of verbal or linguistic knowledge and 
the resulting handicaps to which those who are not pos- 
sessed of this knowledge are subject, and then to show the 
falsity of the estimates or the so-called measurements of 
the intelligence of those thus handicapped, in a word, of 
those who have, in the first instance, either not learned to 
read or read poorly. 

Ability to read and write is generally regarded so all 
pervasive in its effects that among the dictionary syno- 
nyms of “illiterate” we find “unlearned” or “uneducated” 
and “untaught.” A bright child who has not learned to 
read may if he is a good listener get along fairly well in 
the early years of school, and may do correspondingly 
well in the tests of intelligence, but, with advance in 
grade, instruction is decreasingly less by word of mouth 
and increasingly by books so that the progress of the non- 
reader is pretty effectively blocked by the fourth grade of 
school, and his intelligence quotient, according to the cur- 


CHILD, HOME, AND SCHOOL 273 


rently used tests decreases in proportion with his advanc- 
ing years. If, at school entrance, his intelligence quotient 
was found to be even well over 100, it may now have dwin- 
dled to 70 and he himself have become (in the eyes of his 
teachers and of psychologists) a candidate not only for 
the special class, but in some instances, such as have come 
to my attention for a school for the feeble-minded. 

The other day I set some problems in arithmetic for a 
fourteen-year-old girl. She read the simplest problems 
haltingly. In one she met the word “rectangle” and asked 
what the word meant. As I began to reply she anticipated 
my explanation, and explained, “Oh, yes, you mean a 
right-tangle” at the same time outlining with her hand the 
form of a triangle. As I replied, “No, I don’t mean a tri- 
angle,” she burst into laughter at her own confusion, and 
when I in turn outlined with my hands the shape of a rec- 
tangle she promptly solved the problem. The next prob- 
lem began, “To a savings amounting to $2.50.” This 
phrase needed to be paraphrased before a start could be 
made toward the solution of the problem. This girl had 
just secured on a Binet Intelligence Test a score equal to 
that of her age, to be exact, an I.Q. of 98. She had passed 
practical tests of the sixteenth and eighteenth-year level, 
and to my mind was, except for her special disability, well 
above the average of her age in intelligence; yet, although 
she had had eight years of schooling, the last six of which 
had been spent at an excellent private school, she was un- 
able to read as well as the average of third-grade readers, 
and her spelling would easily take place among the won- 
ders of the world. 

If such were the difficulties of arithmetic, what 
chance has such a pupil in the study even of science to say 


QT 4 INTELLIGENT PARENTHOOD 


nothing of history and geography, literature, and of mod- 
ern and ancient languages. The doors of further academic 
training are closed until such time as she has learned to 
read. 

This example you may feel is an extreme and a rare 
one. But, in my opinion, there are a great many children, 
what proportion we can only surmise, whose course 
through school is definitely curtailed because of lesser de- 
grees of the same handicap. They may have overcome the 
handicap at an earlier age, but not outgrown it sufficiently 
but that its influence may be observed in all their subse- 
quent studies. The relative success of students in college 
may be due in part to this factor. I am inclined to this 
explanation to account for the results of a recent study of 
the marks of certain groups of college students. In this 
study the marks in Harvard College of men who subse- 
quently became college professors were compared with 
the marks of men who subsequently became eminent in 
business. Ninety-two per cent of the marks received, 
when undergraduates, by men who subsequently became 
college professors were better than the average or “C” 
grade, whereas but 50 per cent of the grades of the busi- 
ness men were better than average. There were also no- 
ticeable differences between professors. Students who 
later became professors of physics and chemistry received 
only half as many of the highest or “A’’ grades as did 
those who subsequently became professors of Latin and 
Greek and of the modern languages. Another group may 
be mentioned who later became politicians, the Senators 
and Congressmen. They, as the business men—there were 
of course exceptions to the rule—were about average in 
their college standing. 


CHILD, HOME, AND SCHOOL Q75 


We wish now simply to point out that the makers of 
the intelligence tests are faced with the same problem. 
The psychologist who writes “if intelligence is the ability 
to think in terms of abstract ideas, we should expect the 
most successful intelligence tests to be just those which 
involve the use of language and other symbols” would 
evidently not hesitate to award the laurel, as does the col- 
lege, to the professors of Latin and Greek and those of 
the modern languages. He who holds that there are three 
different kinds of intelligence, the abstract, the concrete, 
and the social would explain on this hypothesis very patly 
the academic reports of the business man and of the poli- 
tician. 

The professors of language stand at the peak of emi- 
nence in the literary-academic intelligence which our 
present intelligence tests chiefly measure. Business men, 
it need hardly be said, are not altogether lacking in this 
type of intelligence, nor are the professors altogether 
without other kinds of intelligence. There are no such 
clean-cut demarcations, and of course, other factors com- 
plicate the analysis; but a difference in intelligence is one 
factor which enters into the explanation of these findings. 
The college may or may not be well advised in preferring 
one type of intellect, but tests which purport so to sample 
the different specializations of the mind that comparisons 
may be made of individual differences in intellectual pow- 
er cannot, in all fairness, be thus partial. 

The foregoing considerations may suffice to show why 
the person who is suffering from special disability in 
reading will be at an extraordinarily great disadvantage 
in school and likely to be sadly misjudged by the intelli- 
gence tester. What is true for the non-readers, so-called, 


276 INTELLIGENT PARENTHOOD 


applies in lesser degrees to the poor readers. Before 
turning to a description of specific cases, it may be well 
first to consider briefly some findings in regard to the na- 
ture of their special difficulties. I have recently described 
these at greater length in connection with clinical studies 
of two of my students in a monograph on Special Disabil- 
ities in Learning to Read and Write, and will now only re- 
fer to one or two characteristic features. 

The extreme cases are examples of what have hitherto 
been described as congenital word blindness. It has long 
been held that this condition is due to deficiencies in cer- 
tain so-called word-association areas of the cerebral cor- 
tex. We now feel quite certain that this is not the case, 
and that the disability is due to the presence of deviations 
altogether normal in themselves which, however, conspire 
under the usual requirements of the pedagogy of reading 
and writing to produce what are essentially simply faulty 
habits. We have found for one thing that an unusual pro- 
portion of these cases are left-handed and inclined, when 
they were first taught to write, to produce reversed or 
mirror writing. 

How differences in handedness may possibly operate 
to cause difficulties in reading will appear from the fol- 
lowing statement. If a left-handed boy gets the “feel” of 
the movement made by his right-handed teacher in writ- 
ing the word “cat,” and starting (as she does) from the 
center of the body moves his left hand outward, he will be 
told that he must not move his hand from the right toward 
the left, but from the left toward the right, and that he 
must watch the teacher and do as she does. He is thus 
required at the start to disregard his kinaesthetic stimuli 
and imagery, or at least to subordinate them to the visual. 


CHILD, HOME, AND SCHOOL Q77 


If the kinaesthetic feelings and memories of movement 
happen to be his forte (as compared with the visual), he 
may be doubly injured in the great process of conformity 
which education is. Instead of the integration of kinaes- 
thetic and visual memories which is taking place in his 
right-handed classmates, he begins with something of a 
conflict, because, while he may learn to conform in the 
matter of handwriting, he will follow his inclinations in 
other activities. The little girl who conforms to require- 
ments in writing and in many other activities may slyly, 
when not under the watchful eye of parent or teacher, 
shift the needle into her left hand for sewing. When a 
left-handed boy draws a train of cars or a donkey going 
into a barn no one objects to his engine or his donkey 
facing toward his right. He will naturally draw them this 
way, if, as is natural, he starts with the donkey’s head 
and finishes with its tail, because his hand will thus not 
obstruct his view during the operation. The right-handed 
boy or girl will usually face these objects toward his or 
her left hand for the same reasons. But when the left- 
handed boy begins to write he must “push” his hand in a 
direction which covers what he has written, or adopt a 
position for holding his pencil which is not the correct 
one, and which seems and is, indeed, awkward both from 
his standpoint and that of the observer. This may not 
appear a very serious matter but it is of the nature of an 
initial handicap. 

The initial situation of the non-reader is similar. In 
the cases studied by the speaker, now about twenty-five in 
number, at least a third have been left-handed. This is, 
of course, a somewhat larger proportion than would be 
expected in a group of otherwise normal or superior chil- 


278 : INTELLIGENT PARENTHOOD 


dren such as all of these cases are. The way in which left- 
handedness may possibly operate as an initial handicap 
in reading, just as it has been shown to be in writing, is 
suggested by the following observations. The outgoing 
movement of the left hand is from the center of the body 
toward the left. The left-handed person, possibly because 
he watches what his preferred hand does and thus estab- 
lishes the habit, may show a preference for this same di- 
rection in his eye movements. The reading of “saw” as 
“was” is a very commonly observed error, although it is 
not confined to the left-handed. In tachistoscopic experi- 
ments there is a tendency for the left-handed to catch the 
end letters of words first, just as the right-handed com- 
monly get the initial letters first. The reading of “when” 
as “now” would seem quite unintelligible except as one 
had observed this tendency. A mirror writer showed in 
the Binet test the curious tendency to invert certain series 
as for example, Friday comes after Saturday. In the 
reading test he persisted in placing the required lines 
over the drawing even when it was pointed out to him that 
the directions called for the line to be drawn under the 
figure. The confusion of letters which are the same in 
form but different in position, such as p, g; d, b; n, w, has 
been explained as due to the fact that our earliest memo- 
ries of letters may be muscular. The eye-movements may 
be quite as important as hand movements in fixing these 
memories. 

This description gives but a sample of various motor 
and perceptual difficulties which an analysis of these cases 
of non-readers has brought to light. For the purposes of 
the present discussion they need not be further reviewed. 
It is sufficient to note that when these difficulties become 


CHILD, HOME, AND SCHOOL 279 


accumulative in a given individual pupil and especially 
when they are associated with or complicated by faults 
of early home training which make him in other respects 
a “difficult” pupil we have in the process of formation 
cases such as the physicians have described as congenital 
word-blindness and sometimes have mistaken for cases of 
feeble-mindedness. Except, however, for such small in- 
itial difficulties, there is, in my experience, nothing con- 
genital, and no “blindness” except on the part of the par- 
ents and teachers who have thus signally failed in the 
child’s up-bringing and education. 

We have given some concrete examples of the effects 
of the cultural influences of the home and the school, or of 
their lack, on the intellectual development of children. I 
trust that these suggestions may lead some of you to think 
better of your opportunities as parents and teachers and 
not leave to nature alone, whether it seems to have been 
generous or niggardly, either your own intelligence or the 
intelligences of your children and pupils. 


DIRECT INSTRUCTION IN MORAL AND 
CIVIC EDUCATION 
Ernest Horn, Director, College of Education, 
State University of Iowa 

No one can read the books and magazines which have 
been published during the past year without being im- 
pressed with the strong and universal interest in moral 
and civic education. 

The most disheartening feature of this widespread in- 
terest in moral education and in education for citizenship 
is the fact that so large a number of speakers believe that 
they already have the answer, when those who are most 
carefully studying the problem know that no one has the 
solution at the present time. 

Since the greatest minds that the world has ever 
known have worked with this problem philosophically and 
since a catalogue of the judgments of these people gives 
a long list of divergent recommendations as to how to de- 
velop good conduct in people, it stands to reason that we 
have accomplished all that is possible until we get more 
facts. 

Mere philosophizing, in my judgment, will not bring 
any further improvement except as it is done in the light 
of new data, which are not now in existence. I say this be- 
cause I am quite sure that with this tremendous interest 
in moral education, manifested in every part of the United 
States, we are sure to have books, magazine articles, and 
speeches in which are presented immature and unreliable 
recommendations as to how young children are to be de- 
veloped into moral and law-abiding citizens. 


280 


—_--°* 


CHILD, HOME, AND SCHOOL 281 


This problem of moral education is not new. Parents 


‘and teachers in every age have been confronted with it. 


It is particularly critical, whenever conditions change so 
rapidly that the old traditions, upon which all of us rely 
in large part, break down. At such times the individual is 
confronted with a variety of choices, and must rely, not 
upon his taste and feeling, which are influenced by tradi- 
tion, but upon his intellect. I have great confidence in my 
personal friends, but there is not one of them that I would 
trust to behave himself for one day if you would take 
away from him the traditions, the tastes, and the feelings 
which have always been the backbone of conduct. 

Perhaps no period in the past has seen such rapid 
changes as our own and perhaps no period has seen such a 
break down of traditions. As a consequence of this, it is 
quite clear that all of our educational institutions—the 
church, the home, the school, and the press—have a diffi- 
cult job cut out for them in building a new consensus of 
taste, feeling, and judgment about right conduct. We 
must develop traditional ways of feeling and acting which 
fit the needs of modern life. 

The problem at the present time is made exceedingly 
serious because of the fact that among the younger gen- 
eration or at least among certain groups of young people 
there is a consensus of opinion as to how young people 
should act which does not agree with the consensus to 
which many of us hold as to their proper conduct. This 
divergence of taste and judgment creates a very serious 
situation. We must face the fact that when groups of 
young people have a consensus of taste and opinion which 
is unsocial and morally destructive to themselves as well 
as to others, little can be done to improve the conduct of 


282 INTELLIGENT PARENTHOOD 


individuals in the group until this consensus is changed. 
To lead young people to make this change is a ticklish 
task. 

Our difficulty at the present time is made greater by 
the fact that there is prevalent a particularly pernicious 
philosophy of life. This philosophy of life emphasizes 
self-expression to the neglect of service. It emphasizes 
freedom to the neglect of responsibility. In its worst form 
it advocates the pursuit of immediate interests, often of a 
sensational kind, without any regard for the rights of 
others, or for one’s own future happiness. 

The extreme form of a philosophy of education which 
is held in some quarters teaches that the purpose of edu- 
cation is to cater to the transient interests and purposes of 
children. It is easy to see that unless those purposes are 
defined in terms of the social good, as well as in terms of 
the individual’s own future good, such a type of schooling 
plays all too well into the hands of this unsatisfactory 
philosophy of life. 

What we need is not more initiative or self-expres- 
sion of a nondescript kind, what we want are initiatives 
and modes of self-expression of a desirable kind. What 
we want is not a purpose without regard to its social val- 
ue, what we want are certain purposes of definite value in 
life. Certainly no philosophy of education which divorces 
freedom, purpose, and self-expression from responsibility 
and service can be accepted as a guide in making good 
citizens. 

Few realize how difficult the position is in which mod- 
ern teachers are placed. Even when we agree that men 
and women should act in a certain way, it is not easy to 
teach young people to act in that way. But when the com- 


CHILD, HOME, AND SCHOOL 283 


munity cannot agree as to how men and women should 
act in a given situation, you can readily see that the 
teacher’s task in developing right conduct in that situa- 
tion is particularly difficult. There are those who say that, 
under the circumstances, all that can be done is to teach 
the pupil to think for himself, and to take an open-minded 
attitude even toward types of conduct that many now 
think to be immoral. I believe that I can show that such 
a belief is absurd, and that the school must directly pre- 
pare the child to be sensitive to right and wrong in moral 
and civic situations and must teach him how to act in the 
most important of the situations. To do this, however, it 
is necessary to get the best possible consensus as to what 
desirable conduct ‘is in typical and important situations in 
life. Accordingly, the first job in moral and civic educa- 
tion is to make a careful analysis of present moral and 
civic situations in order to build out of that consensus the 
course of study which is to be the teacher’s guide. I shall 
mention but two of the procedures which have been fol- 
lowed in the attempt to make such a course of study. 

First, one hundred judges, I mean by that one hun- 
dred high-grade citizens, were asked two questions. The 
first question was this: Think of the individual who in 
your judgment would be the greatest loss if removed from 
your community. Now think of situations in which you 
have known that individual to be, and tell concretely and 
specifically what that individual did in those situations to 
make him a desirable member of the community. The pur- 
pose of this investigation is to get a large and complete 
list of the important moral and civic situations in life and 
to determine what our best citizens, men and women, do 
in those situations. 


284 INTELLIGENT PARENTHOOD 


The second question was: Think now of the individ- 
ual that your community would be best rid of. Think of 
specific situations in which you know that individual to 
have been. What did the individual do in those situations © 
that made him so objectionable to your community? 

From the answers to these questions it is possible to 
get a fair catalogue of the typical moral situations in a 
community and also a fair catalogue, appraised by com- 
petent people, of desirable and undesirable modes of con- 
duct in those situations. 

So much for the first method of attack. We have only 
started upon this, and we will have to depend no doubt 
upon groups such as this to carry on this very careful, 
concrete type of invoice of social situations and trait ac- 
tions in those situations. 

The results of a second investigation have been used 
as a check on the data obtained from the answers to these 
two questions. It seemed to the speaker that the race 
must have learned something about what is good to do, 
and that if we could find the deposit of this racial wis- 
dom, we should find by an analysis of that deposit at 
least a hint as to how people should act in important types 
of situations. It seemed to the speaker that the richest 
deposit of data on moral conduct would probably be found 
in our laws. It is clear that wherever two individuals dis- 
agree as to what is right to do, or where there is conflict 
between an individual and a community, or where there 
is disagreement between communities, such disagreement, 
if serious, is likely to come before the court, and if often 
repeated, to become the subject of a law. 

In all of these hundreds of years the race has experi- 
mented to find the best rules of living. To the critical 


CHILD, HOME, AND SCHOOL 285 


formulation and interpretation of these rules have been 
devoted some of the keenest minds and finest characters 
that the world has ever known. The result is our present 
body of law. I believe that any citizen of a middle west- 
ern state who will read the code for his state will see that 
that code tends to approach the most ethical statement 
which can be practically administered before the court. 
A catalogue, then, of the actual cases in law with the fre- 
quencies with which they occur and the penalties attached 
to them seems to give us a very valuable prospectus of all 
of the civic and moral situations which are serious enough 
to get before the court. 

These are but two of many procedures by which stu- 
dents of this problem are attempting to decide what 
should be taught to the next generation. 

Coming back now to an inspection of our time, with 
its divergent points of view and its rapidly changing eco- 
nomic and social conditions, it is easy to see that many 
individuals have not adjusted themselves satisfactorily 
to these changes. This failure is shown in a striking way 
by our crime statistics. The seriousness of the situation 
in this country can be shown by comparing our crime 
statistics with those of certain other parts of the world. 
It is disturbing to know that one is forty times as likely 
to be murdered in this country as he would be if he lived 
in Switzerland, and when one objects that we cannot 
compare European conditions with those in America, it is 
still disturbing to know that one is sixteen times as likely 
to be murdered in this country as he would be if he lived 
in Ontario or Quebec. These differences are too large to 
be casually put aside, and similar differences can be 
shown in the statistics for other types of crime. 


286 INTELLIGENT PARENTHOOD 


Clearly, we have before us a problem that merits the 
most serious consideration on the part of every one of our 
fundamental institutions. Can this problem be attacked 
directly? In the past and indeed even in the present, 
many have felt that direct instruction in moral and civic 
education cannot be given. It has been said that matters 
of morals are so subtle that they cannot be handled di- 
rectly. It is maintained by those who have held that point 
of view that we must get our moral education indirectly 
as a by-product from the playground, from the teaching 
of literature, and from the teaching of history. 

Twenty years ago many schools started a program of 
teaching spelling, and arithmetic and reading incidental- 
ly. There were no separate periods in these schools for 
teaching these subjects, but a careful and scientific meas- 
ure of the results has shown that that plan is not efficient. 
The most careful investigators have concluded that it is 
best to leave the unimportant things to incidental teach- 
ing, but to put the important things in the forefront, and 
so that they occupy the focus of attention, not only on the 
part of teachers but also on the part of pupils and parents. 

Direct instruction then in moral and civic education 
seems to be demanded. Certainly no one can doubt the 
importance of such instruction. I have two boys. It does 
not worry me very much when I find that they missed one 
or two addition problems in their last test, or that they 
misspelled a few words, or that a recitation in geography 
was not all it ought to have been, but if they come home 
with the slightest indication of any moral deficiency, I 
must confess that I am worried. I feel sure that a similar 
distinction in value is in the mind of every parent in this 
audience. The big things, the things that count most, the 


CHILD, HOME, AND SCHOOL 287 


things in which we must put our hearts, our imagination, 
and our efforts, fall in the field of moral and civic edu- 
cation. 

I believe that those who say that morals are too 
subtle or too indefinite to be taught directly or that the 
pupils cannot understand such things either have not tried 
to teach children by direct methods, or have not gone 
about the job frankly and with sympathy. 

Let me give an illustration of direct teaching: In a 
certain city of about 40,000, the children in going to 
school cut across lots. Lawns were damaged, shrubbery 
broken down, and flower beds ruined. The first-grade 
teacher in this school saw in this situation a need for 
moral instruction. She went about the job frankly and 
directly. She could have lectured her pupils on that point 
and laid down rules, but having been trained to give a dif- 
ferent type of moral instruction she did not do that. 
Rather, she took her pupils out to see some of these lots 
with the damaged lawns, shrubbery, and flower beds. She 
asked them if they saw anything there that they would 

not like if they owned the property. 
She asked the pupils how they thought the household- 
ers felt about the damage. The children saw very readily 
that the householders, of course, would not like to see 
their property harmed in any way. 

She might have stopped at that point by saying, 
“Let’s not do that any more.” Instead, she asked, “How 
can we be sure that we stop cutting across these lots?” 

The pupils discussed a plan for stopping this tres- 
pass and they did stop it. They soon observed, however, 
that the pupils of the other grades were cutting across 
the lawns. They asked whether they ought not to try to 


288 INTELLIGENT PARENTHOOD 


get the rest of the pupils to stop damaging these prop- 
erties. Again they formulated their plan of action. They 
went to the householders apologizing to them, explaining 
that they really had not meant to do any damage. They 
asked the owners’ permission to put up signs opposite the 
places where most of the damage had been done. The 
pupils made these signs themselves and put them up. 
Then they planned short speeches and chose representa- 
tives to go to the other grades in the school to make an 
appeal to them to stop cutting across lots. 

They also posted little girls and boys opposite these 
corners near the school to remind boys and girls that they 
should not cut across the lots. 

Now the teacher could have let the matter stop there. 
She had obtained results in terms of conduct. Instead she 
led her pupils to apply what they had learned to other 
situations. She asked them if they could think of other 
instances where they had, without thinking, damaged the 
property of others. Two children suggested that they re- 
membered sliding down a neighbor’s hay stack; others 
that they had been playing in an empty building without 
the permission of the owner; and so on, until the black- 
board was full of a variety of cases of trespass. 

Then, working sympathetically, she led the children 
to state the general principles that they should keep in 
mind in all these situations. Each child who had been 
trespassing was led to plan how not to trespass in the 
future. 

I would like to have you notice certain things in this 
teaching. First, it started with a concrete situation that 
could be readily understood by the children. Second, the 
pupils themselves were allowed to sense what was wrong 


CHILD, HOME, AND SCHOOL 289 


in that situation. Third, the pupils were allowed to for- 
mulate for themselves a plan for right ‘conduct. Fourth, 
they were allowed to carry it out, and they were left with 
the feeling that they had not done their job until it was 
carried out. Mere talking is not enough. Fifth, they were 
encouraged to plan for transferring what they had 
learned in this situation to other situations of a similar 
type and class; and last, they were guided in formulating 
in their own words and for themselves principles of con- 
duct to govern them in the future. 

You will notice that pupil initiative and proper self- 
expression were emphasized in all that this teacher did. 
Her teaching illustrates how one can combine all of the 
good that is claimed for freedom on the part of children 
with a definite sense of responsibility on their part. Here 
you nave all of the benefits claimed by the disciplinarians 
coupled with the best that is claimed by those who empha- 
size freedom and self-expression. 

Direct instruction, of the type just described, is now 
to be found in a great number of public schools. I have 
asked all of the teachers associated with me to be very 
critical about results. I have asked them several ques- 
tions: First, is this less concrete and understandable than 
other subjects? Without exception they say, “No, it is 
more concrete.” The child can understand not only exact- 
ly what it is that he is supposed to be working out but also 
why he is supposed to be working it out. Second, I have 
asked these teachers to tell whether or not this is less in- 
teresting than other subjects in the school. They say that 
it is more interesting. Third, I have asked them to judge 
critically whether it is not more important for the com- 


290 INTELLIGENT PARENTHOOD 


munity and for the children than other studies in the 
school. The answer is that it is more important. Fourth, 
I have asked them to tell whether it has as unmistakable 
an effect upon the conduct of pupils right now as well as a 
promise of affecting the future as to other studies. They 
say, “More so.” 

In other words, in our two years of preliminary ex- 
perimentation of concrete, direct moral instruction, we 
have at the present time, I believe, uniform enthusiasm on 
the part of teachers and of parents who have participated 
in this type of work. 

Now I should like very much to guard against misun- 
derstanding. This work is as yet only in its beginning. 
However, for the first time in twenty years of attempted 
study of the problem of citizenship and the problems of 
moral education, I have seen definite, tangible results of a 
positive character, and while I believe that one should get 
all that he can get out of the indirect effects through lit- 
erature, through play, through history, through music, or 
through any other agency, I am perfectly clear in my own 
mind that we need to present a positive and direct pro- 
gram in moral and civic instruction in every grade in the 
public schools. 

Now keep in mind the fact that this does not mean 
lectures on moral education by the teacher. 

I gave you in detail one incident to let you see how 
little it means that. Neither does it mean the mere repeat- 
ing of moral codes such as, “I am altruistic,” “I look out 
for the rights of others,” “I am not selfish,” and so forth. 
I have never been able to see how one could depend upon 


CHILD, HOME, AND SCHOOL 291 


five minutes of such lip service as the basis of a program 
in moral and civic education. 

I repeat, then, that the results that we have obtained 
so far are most encouraging. On the other hand, it is quite 
clear that we need to emphasize that we do not have scien- 
tific data at the present time which enable us to see with 
complete confidence that we are on the best road. Cer- 
tainly, a final answer to many of the most important ques- 
tions cannot now be given. 

The next twenty-five or thirty years should see great- 
er emphasis on research in this field than has ever been 
seen in any other field of education. We have devoted 
science to material progress; we must now devote science 
to the study of the betterment of the conduct of individ- 
uals, because it is at that point that our failure is mani- 
fest. 

In this field of direct instruction in moral education, 
it must be recognized that without proper method, and 
without proper sympathetic attitudes such as I described 
in the illustration of the work of one first-grade teacher, 
the best intentions on the part of teachers may come to 
nothing. We need to map out specifically all the situations 
to which these people must be taught to respond properly. 
We need to give them a consensus of judgment as to what 
should be done in those situations, and more than that, we 
need to develop on their part a strong emotional bias in 
favor of appropriate conduct. We need to develop con- 
duct on the basis of taste. It has always been a maxim, in 
teaching morals, that until the individual does what is 
right as a matter of feeling and as a matter of taste, he 
cannot be safely left to act as he should act. 


292 INTELLIGENT PARENTHOOD 


With all this talk about teaching the pupil to think 
for himself, it must be kept in mind that life is so compli- 
cated and the wisdom of the race so subtle that unless one 
is reinforced by proper sentiments and tastes and feel- 
ings, it is always all too easy to think of a logical-sound- 
ing excuse for doing what one knows perfectly well he 
ought not to do. 


ROUND TABLE DISCUSSION: 
CULTURAL NEEDS OF THE CHILD 


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CULTURAL NEEDS OF THE CHILD 


The Luncheon Round Table Discussion on the Cul- 
tural Needs of the Child held under’the auspices of the 
Central Council of Childhood Education, and following 
the Mid-West Conference on Parent-Education, convened 
at 1:45 p.m. in the Grand Ball Room of the Palmer 
House, Chicago, Illinois, Miss Alta Adkins, President of 
the Central Council of Childhood Education, Chicago, 
presiding. The program opened with a delightful group 
of songs beautifully rendered by Charles Lewis Graves, 
tenor, accompanied by Mary Pearce Niemann. 

CuairnMANn ApkIns: I begrudge every minute that I 
must use, for it delays hearing something valuable from 
these people we have with us today. I will have to take a 
few minutes, however, for it is only due to the Central 
Council, which holds its meetings here in Chicago, that 
we should have just a word about its purposes. 

The people who organized that Council had been, for 
a number of years, very active in kindergarten and pri- 
mary organizations here in Chicago. They felt that it was 
wrong to keep the kindergarten an issue by itself, and the 
primary school another issue by itself. The same group 
wanted to go to all meetings. The various groups had 
common interests, although they had, in a number of 
cases, of course, special problems. So the Central Council 
was formed, uniting those groups. The Chicago Kinder- 
garten Club, which for years had been an inspiration to 
teachers, was the first one to come in. The Chicago branch 


295 


296 INTELLIGENT PARENTHOOD 


of the National Council of Primary Education gave up its 
regular meetings that its members might attend the Cen- 
tral Council. The members of the state branch of the IIli- 
nois Kindergarten Primary Group came in and are mem- 
bers of that through the Council. 

The hope of the Council is that the feeling of unity, 
the conviction that members of the different departments 
of education should not be isolated, but that people should 
work together, will be realized. It is this hope that the 
Central Council wishes to express to you today and this 
hope that the Council wishes everyone who is in contact 
with it to feel. 

A very significant movement which shows the trend 
along this line occurred in Washington just a week ago 
when two organizations came together. The Kindergar- 
ten Department and the National Council of Primary 
Education have been having their meetings separately, 
the interests from one flashing over to the interest of the 
other, until the unity of purpose became markedly evident 
to all. So it was decided that the National Education As- 
sociation be asked to change the name of the Kindergar- 
ten Department, to the Department of Childhood Educa- 
tion, that it might include preschool workers on the one 
hand and the elementary grades on the other. The feeling 
was very strong that grades above the primary need to be 
considered part of the unit of childhood education. It is 
wrong to cut off the spirit of primary, kindergarten, and 
nursery education at the end of the third grade and say, 
“Now in the fourth grade you can sit and get your lessons 
out of books, and you don’t need to do anything else.” So 
the move was made requesting a Department of Child- 
hood Education. 


CULTURAL NEEDS OF CHILD 297 


I won’t take any more time to mention the purpose of 
the Central Council. It meets the first Saturday of every 
month in Chicago, in the Central Eleanor Club Rooms, 17 
N. State Street, at 10:30 a.m., and attempts to unite the 
interests of workers throughout the district, forming 
ideals, interchanging experiences, and influencing pro- 
cedure. 

One of the most outstanding things, one of the great- 
est inspirations of this meeting has been the fact that the 
members of the Chicago Association for Child Study, 
which has planned this great Conference, are parents in- 
stead of teachers. We teachers have heretofore pushed 
and pushed and pushed to bring such things about. It is 
indeed a thrilling event to have parents take the lead so 
splendidly, and do something as far-reaching in its influ- 
ence as they have done in this Conference. It has been a 
most happy association that our Council and the Child 
Study Organization have had together. 

We are especially fortunate this afternoon in having 
not only these splendid speakers who belong in our midst, 
but also some guests of distinguished note, and as Miss 
Hill of Columbia University is with us, and has to leave 
early, we are asking her right now to give you a word of 
greeting. We told her she could give just as many words 
as she wished, because we want to hear every word she 
has to say. 

Miss Parry Smiru Hixu (Professor of Education, 
Teachers’ College, Columbia University): Members of 
the Central Council of Childhood Education and of the 
Chicago Association for Child Study. I am today some- 
what overwhelmed by finding out what I should have 
probably knowx except for my leave of absence abroad, 


298 INTELLIGENT PARENTHOOD 


that you had made this organization. I think it is a won- 
derful step. The whole keynote of education, national, in- 
dustrial, and social reform now seems along the line of 
uniting many varieties of organizations into one and mak- 
ing some one strong, able, efficient piece of work to be 
accomplished. 

We should have done something like this in my own 
home town and I said to Miss Temple, as I was talking 
over the whole thing with her, that except for the fact 
that life is such a rushing thing in New York (of course 
you don’t have any such guilty thing as that here), I 
would go right back home and say, “We must catch up 
with Chicago and do something of this kind.” 

This is literally true. When I come away from the 
little Island out into the West and hear reports such as 
we heard last week from the state of Iowa, I find myself 
thrilled with the fine things you are doing and this really 
is a step that I hope is a standard for other organizations 
all over the country. You certainly can all together have 
some one fine piece of work, and you can attend the meet- 
ing offered by one organization, whereas you cannot at- 
tend all of these varieties of meetings offered by different 
organizations. I congratulate you heartily, and I hope 
that it not only will be a standard for us, but a standard 
for other people. 

I also want to take this occasion again to congratu- 
late the Association for Child Study for their meeting 
here. We had one, as you, in the East in New York this 
fall, and it has been my privilege to attend both. It is a 
wonderful thing in the history of—I started to say edu- 
cation, probably larger—of American civilization, that 
these mothers are organizing, working, and pushing it 


he 


CULTURAL NEEDS OF CHILD | 299 


themselves. That has been said many times but we ought 
not forget what a remarkable thing it is that these great 
gatherings have taken place, and I have no doubt that 
two months will not go by before we will be invited to one 
out on the Pacific Coast. I am quite sure they will have 
one out there. They certainly will not be outdone by the 
Middle West and the East. 

The thing that impresses me is this: I see many 
friendly faces in the audience. I know they will smile. To 
me it is more and more true every day I live that we can- 
not hope to do anything for the children in our midst in 
the schools until we remember that we are just one of the 
children’s teachers, and that the most effective teachers 
of all are at home. I like to say it with our teachers over 
and over again; the two great learning situations in which 
children live are the school and the home, and we must 
regard parents as teachers and ourselves as mothers. 
When we take on the fine qualities of the mother, and 
mothers take on the fine qualities of the teacher, and we 
regard ourselves as the two teachers in the two situations, 
we will get somewhere with these children. 

It gives me the greatest pleasure to be with you to- 
day and to carry the message back to my little Island in 
New York. 


Cuairman Apxins: In selecting the subjects for dis- 
cussion at this luncheon, we felt that the cultural needs of 
children should receive special attention. Many topics 
have been discussed during the conference concerning the 
growth of children, but we want to have some of the cul- 
tural influences touched upon specifically. Not that the 
others are not cultural; there are cultural phases to all of 


300 INTELLIGENT PARENTHOOD 


them, but there are some subjects which seem to put a fin- 
ishing touch upon the ideals, and the interests of children. 
For that reason we have friends with us today who will 
talk upon music and upon creative dancing. 

The first of these speakers will be Mrs. Kern of the 
University of Chicago. I am sure she needs no introduc- 
tion. Her work in music is known everywhere as lovely. 


CULTURAL INFLUENCE OF MUSIC 
Mrs. Mary Root Kern, School of Education, 
University of Chicago 

It is a great privilege to be allowed to speak on one’s 
hobby, especially when it has been so kindly referred to 
as it has now. I think music has fought its battle and has 
taken its proper place with us all in school work, but a 
great deal of progress has been made recently in its han- 
dling and its presentation. It has become a very much 
more vital thing in its correlation with other parts of the 
curriculum and with its effect on the child’s own life and 
experience. The reaction that we get from children in 
music can now be measured better than it ever used to be 
because they are allowed more freedom of expression in 
their responses. We find out better how they react to it, 
what they like, and what is useful for them to have. 

I was thinking this morning when I saw the babies on 
the screen playing with a ring or a rattle or whatever it 
was, that that was a very good place to begin the child’s 
musical education by giving him something which has a 
beautiful tone. Our nurseries are equipped with beautiful 
color and with modern improvements for their physical 
well-being, but I think beautiful tone rarely is considered — 


CULTURAL NEEDS OF CHILD 301 


in the nursery, and we all know that cradle culture is a 
very important feature in culture. We like to begin early 
with little children in giving them what will make for a 
natural, instinctive response to beauty, so in the nursery, 
failing the mother’s voice (what Whitman calls the deli- 
cious singing of the mother’s voice) we should have some- 
thing which the child may listen to as lovely tone. 

In the home I think much of the implanted light and 
music comes when the child is very little. When he is 
playing with his blocks, if he hears lovely music it is going 
to have its effect upon him. Dr. Charters, in a recent lec- 
ture which he called “The Re-Education of Parents,” 
mentioned the fact that it is very difficult to impress upon 
our children what we have not ourselves in morality, in 
kindness, in honesty. He named many things. I think the 
musical atmosphere of the home will react upon the child 
so strongly that no matter how ambitious the parents may 
be to have the child finally musical, he is not so apt to be 
unless the parents themselves cultivate in their home the 
feeling for beautiful and cultural music. 

Of course, nowadays we have a great deal of mechan- 
ical music, I was going to say, to contend with. It is very 
useful, where the other kind is not available, but where 
the first-hand music is available, I believe that is still 
better. 

One of the great objections to mechanical music is 
that it very rarely is listened to with respect. Usually if 
a record is being played, or the radio is giving us some- 
thing that is worth while listening to, it is very difficult to 
ereate an audience in the house. It is very difficult to 
really be quiet and listen to it. To have the right effect 
from beautiful music we must have quiet, because tone, the 


302 INTELLIGENT PARENTHOOD 


quality of tone, is almost a spiritual thing, if it is beauti- 
ful, and we cannot have it interfered with. 

I think that in music appreciation very often the 
teacher hunts for another record while one is being played 
or winds the instrument while it is being played. In that 
way she does not create the right atmosphere for the ap- 
preciation that she wants. Real music appreciation is an 
emotional thing, an emotional reaction, and to be quiet 
and allow that emotional reaction to come is part of her 
use as a teacher, because children imitate so much what 
they see. If the teacher shows respect for a beautiful 
thing the children are very much more apt to show that 
respect and wait for the thing she wants them to get. 

In school singing I feel that the tone is pre-eminently 
the desirable field for work, especially in the younger 
grades. If we have established beautiful tone with the lit- 
tle children it will persist in the older grades. 

I read the other day of a principal who said that he 
did not wish to give a place to music because he would 
just as leave hear a flock of ducks quacking as children 
singing. The people to whom that was said were very in- 
dignant but I did not feel so indignant. I have heard 
class singing that was a great deal like the quacking of a 
flock of ducks. You know if a child is doing a thing re- 
luctantly, he is very apt to speak in a flat, nasal way, and 
unless he is given something that seems charming to him, 
it is going to be difficult for us to get the class tone that 
we want. 

A few poor voices ruin the class tone. Maybe you re- 
member Dr. Ricks on the Voice Training of Public School 
Children, in which he says that the child voice is the most 
beautiful musical instrument. Those of us who have spent 


CULTURAL NEEDS OF CHILD 303 


a great deal of time in getting rid of the obstacles to the 
_ child’s beautiful tone realize the truth of that statement. 
If we take our little children who are singing normally and 
let them sing by themselves, a little model chorus, maybe 
in the kindergarten, or the first or second or third grade, 
we get the most thrilling, beautiful resonance, a silvery 
quality that is as charming as any tone that we can hear. 

I think it is the duty of the young teacher to know 
how to get that tone and how to preserve it, and so I am 
going to say a few practical things today on that subject. 
The vowel sound of “oo” sung on a high pitch gains the 
sound or tone that we want. The child cannot sing “oo” 
on a high pitch in his wrong voice quality, and his right 
voice quality is beautiful, and will be beautiful. To find 
little exercises and words that contain this desirable vowel 
quality and let the children sing on a high pitch, before 
they begin the singing of their songs, will help not only to 
establish in their own mind the tone that you want, but it 
will persist more or less through the entire song. 

In this month of February my older children have 
been singing “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” I think 
maybe it is the last time I shall ever teach a war song, but 
I did not realize until they were all singing it how much 
emotion was aroused by it. But the thing I shall not give 
up will be the chorus of “Glory, Glory, Hallelujah,” for 
it is the best voice training exercise that I know. 

The little children love to say the words as soon as 
they have learned it, and “Glory, Glory, Hallelujah” has 
in it enough of vitality to be perfectly charming for them 
to sing. Whereas the syllable “lu” on the high pitch beats 
this lovely voice quality that I want to have above all 
things in my music work. 


304 INTELLIGENT PARENTHOOD 


Many other little exercises of that sort can be used, 
and it is well worth while to spend a minute or two or 
three, of the music period, with exercise on a high pitch 
with the vowel sound of “‘oo,”’ and the teacher with initia- 
tive can find little phrases which contain that and which 
are charming in this thought to the child, something that 
will make his voice vital. 

I was interested recently in a Symphony Concert 
when the cellist, Cassaels, was the soloist. After he had 
finished his number he played a few selections from a 
suite of Bach. These did not contain any marvelous re- 
quirements for dexterity, but were of such exquisite tone 
that after he had been recalled six or eight times, the 
whole audience rose. That was a tribute to tone quality, 
for certainly the Bach melody and the Bach technical re- 
quirements are not such as to excite anyone, but this beau- 
tiful tone produced an effect which I have not seen at 
Orchestra Hall for a great many years. 

Let us remember that to make music cultural for the 
children, to make it lovely to them, we must work indi- 
rectly, not insist, but work indirectly for this beautiful 
tone quality which all through their musical life will color 
their own enjoyment in their work and that of other 
people. 

To gain enough mastery of the various technicalities 
in children’s music, I think the teachers should be able to 
select songs from a clear basis of what they want to gain. 
Fortunately, today we have beautiful music to select from 
for children, and if the purpose in the teacher’s mind is to 
get a fine, accurate rhythm she can find a song which will 
naturally bring forth fine accurate rhythm. There are 
percussive consonants so that the children come in on the 


CULTURAL NEEDS OF CHILD 805 


exact accent and no word need be said about it. They are 
imitative. If she gives them the model with this perfect 
rhythm and good vital speech they will respond with that. 
If she wants fine tone quality she will select the song with 
the round vowels on the high notes of the song, and on 
many of the accents through it. If she wants something 
which will bring an emotional response from them she 
can find an art song, so called, which is so beautiful of 
itself that she loves it and then the children will love it. 

I am glad to see that the important music publishers 
are now publishing accompaniments with the songs for 
the children, and more and more a keyboard instrument 
should be and will be in the room where the music lesson 
is given. I read the other day that in the city of Pitts- 
burgh it is a law that every primary lesson shall be given 
with a keyboard instrument, and the little, inexpensive 
pianos and the inexpensive organs which can easily be 
moved from room to room make it possible for the chil- 
dren to have the enrichment of harmony for their singing. 

Music appreciation in the younger grades at all 
events may be accomplished through beautiful piano or 
organ accompaniment. The children will not need special 
lessons in music appreciation. They are in a hurry to get 
through the technical work of reading and of learning the 
melody and the words, and say, “Now play it with two 
hands.” They want that enrichment of the accompani- 
ment because of its beauty, not to help them to sing it be- 
cause they have already learned to sing it, but because of 
the beauty. If in these early grades they learn to love a 
beautiful song, that is the foundation for one of the great- 
est joys they can have through life. 


306 INTELLIGENT PARENTHOOD 


I feel that the learning of beautiful songs and singing 
them requires as much self-control as any other activity in 
their young lives. Self-control, social work, social feeling, 
and a certain sense of something more lovely than any-— 
thing that they get elsewhere comes with the singing of 
beautiful songs. After we have been singing a very beau- 
tiful song the children show their response to that in 
leaving my room. They come to me for music and they 
leave by saying, “Goodbye, Mrs. Kern,” or, “See you to- 
morrow.” It means that there is a little social feeling 
which is quite other from the jumping up and hurrying 
out to their next class. It is a little response to me. It is 
as much as if they said, “We have been having a beautiful 
time,” “This has been very precious to us,” as it is to me. 

The chances that we have at present in Chicago in 
the orchestral concerts that Mr. Stock is giving to the 
children and that can be received by radio are wonderful. 
Beautiful records of the work also show the quality of the 
different instruments. We are especially fortunate in this 
day and generation in being able to give to the children in 
a most beautiful way what we used to have to preach to 
them about—we give it to them so that they, themselves, 
get it without our interference. 


CuarrMAN Apxins: As our topic this afternoon is 
“Cultural Influence” we wanted to include art, but were 
unable to get Professor Sargent from the University of 
Chicago as we had hoped. We have included creative 
dancing, and Mrs. Kranz, of Northwestern University, is 
to speak to us later, upon that subject. 

As I said, we have some distinguished visitors with 
us this afternoon. We have at the table Professor Alma 


CULTURAL NEEDS OF CHILD 307 


Binzel, and I want you to be sure to hear just a how-do- 
you-do from her. I believe that before Mrs. Kranz talks 
we will have Miss Binzel for just a moment. 

It is a great privilege to introduce to you Miss Alma 
Binzel, lecturer upon parent education. 

Miss Brnzet: Madam Chairman, I think what you 
ought to label me in the future is, “pedagogical tramp,” 
because I am really not tied up for any length of time dur- 
ing the year to any organization. That is, I am with an 
organization for eight weeks, or some other organization 
for a week, maybe a kindergarten club for three days, and 
some other organization for exactly one day, or for one 
hour. 

What makes me a pedagogical tramp? I suppose be- 
cause I revolted somewhat as a kindergartner. Most of 
you know John Watson and a number of other people, 
like Dr. Bagley, who came to the International Kinder- 
garten Union meetings time and time again. They told us 
how important we were because we had the children first, 
and we were to unkink the kinks that the kindly, well-in- 
tentioned, terribly loving, but awfully uninformed par- 
ents put into the personalities and character of children. 

You know, to be told year in and year out that you are 
the most important part of the public-school system be- 
cause you are a kindergarten teacher finally leads you to 
ask the question, “Well, if the kindergartners with two or 
more years of study of child life can unkink and then 
build up, wouldn’t a few years of similar training on the 
part of the parents, supposing that their intelligence quo- 
tients are about as good in general as the intelligence 
quotients of those of us who stay in teaching rather than 


308 INTELLIGENT PARENTHOOD 


parenthood, wouldn’t the intelligence of parents profit by 
just such study, and make it possible for the parents to do 
correct kinking, appropriate to the first four years of 


child life so that when we as kindergartners Beh them we > 


can just put in the next kinks?” 

I rebelled being told that I was to be an unkinker 
and then a kinker, and I began to talk about parental and 
pre-parental education, and I have very learned friends 
who said, ‘‘Miss Binzell, for heaven’s sake, don’t use those 
phrases. You will scare people if you use such words. 
You had better call the whole business child welfare.” 

Again I rebelled, and I said, “If it is all right to talk 
about children and child study, why isn’t it right to talk 
about the other, parental and pre-parental education?” 
So I cut out connections with various universities and be- 
gan to talk this thing. 

I am going to wind up by saying I congratulate not 
only the kindergarten, the primary, and the elementary- 
school teacher in organizing under the general title 
“Council of Childhood Education” in this, the central 
Middle West, but I want to congratulate the Chicago As- 


sociation for Child Study that it had the courage to put, 


“and Parent Education,” in its title. You have taken the 
most forward step. You are not afraid to say that parents 
should be educated and that it is perfectly legitimate. 

I have asked, and prophesied, that in the very near 
future we would have parents buildings in large cities 
that would rival, not in elegance of structure and decora- 
tion and so forth, the handsome men’s and women’s club 
houses, lodges, and so forth, but that we would have large 
buildings adequate for the service that parents should 


a 


CULTURAL NEEDS OF CHILD 309 


render each other. I have prophesied in various commu- 
nities such buildings within five years. I have prophesied 
departments of parental education in privately endowed 
and also state-endowed universities, and to have to come 
here to Chicago and hear Harvard men and Yale men and 
Minnesota men and Iowa men talk not only about paren- 
tal education, but pre-parental education, at the third or 
fourth grade, as Dr. Gesell hinted at this morning, is cer- 
tainly going beyond me a little bit. I had talked about it 
at about the seventh and eighth grade. 

I want to express my very deep appreciation of this 
opportunity of being here in Chicago for this perfect 
three days. I had the opportunity, too, of being in New 
York City last October and November for that first big 
parenthood conference. If Miss Hill were here she would 
be glad to know that this very month of March on the Cali- 
fornia Coast right in the Bay cities, there is also a parent- 
hood conference in progress. There have already been 
two parenthood conferences in Brooklyn in the East, so 
you see how tremendous the sweep of this interest is. It 
makes it perfectly legitimate to say that the outstanding 
new feature in education during this coming quarter of 
the twentieth century is parental education and pre-pa- 
rental education; and grandmothers here in Chicago have 
already told me that the thing is under way which will or- 
ganize them into a child study group from the grand- 
parents’ points of view. 


CuairMAN Apxins: Now we will ask Mrs. Kranz, of 
Northwestern University, to give us a talk on Creative 
Dancing. 


310 INTELLIGENT PARENTHOOD 


CREATIVE DANCING 
Mrs. Margaret Schulv Kranz, School of Speech, 
Northwestern University 

When Miss Bower asked me to speak I objected very 
strenuously. I wrote to her several times and mentioned 
different names of people who could do it. It was not be- 
cause I was not enthusiastic about it, but because I 
wanted somebody who could really instil enthusiasm into 
you to speak to you. I want so badly to have the world 
realize what dancing can do in the educational field. I 
think I feel more or less apologetic to speak to such a 
group as this, but I must say that selfishly I am glad I did 
decide to speak, because of the inspiration I have re- 
ceived. I think everybody feels the things they are inter- 
ested in is the panacea for all ills. Being a very normal 
individual, I found that to be true, and everything said 
yesterday in the child-study meeting just seemed to fit my 
type of work. 

I should mention right here that at intervals I should 
be making quotation marks, because all the while I am 
speaking I will be quoting. What I am saying has been 
inspired by Miss Margaret Doebler, of the University of 
Wisconsin, with whom IJ studied, and whose work I am 
following. I am sure a great many of you know Miss 
Doebler and her work. Again I say I want to be apolo- 
getic in speaking to this group. I feel many of you are as 
enlightened on the subject, perhaps, as I am. I have been 
working along this line so much (six years), that it seems 
to me everybody must know it. However, occasionally, 
just the other day, I was attending a woman’s club, and in 
one of the individual rooms a little class was having danc- 
ing—girls about eight years of age. I thought, “Oh, dear, 


CULTURAL NEEDS OF CHILD 311 


there are still some parents who are not quite enlight- 
ened.” It happened to be in a neighborhood in which you 
would expect enlightened folks to be. 

Dancing has always been thought of as something 
separate among the arts, as just decorative, perhaps, to 
physical education, as a recreation, something to build up 
the individual physically, and then, too, it has merely 
been an imitative process. Someone else has done the 
thinking and given it to the child to do. In that respect 
you can easily see that it has not correlated and been on a 
par with the new theories and new ideas in education. 

I know that many different theories have been ex- 
pounded here, and you all speak of theories of education. 
I won’t mention any of them at all to argue about the theo- 
ries, but if we enumerate any of the elements like self- 
activity and self-expression, some of the main thoughts in 
the new theories of education, and self-development of 
the individual, dancing from the old point of view has not 
fulfilled that requirement. It has not been on a par. The 
other arts have asserted themselves to a greater extent 
than the dance has. If we think of it as an imitative proc- 
ess, following out what somebody else has done in thought 
for us, we, of course, cannot consider it as an art. Art 
must be self-expressive. 

We should consider it just from the point of view of 
skill. Dancing has so often been considered as something 
outside of the educational field that we have not realized 
that in itself it can correlate and bring in all the elements 
so worth while in education. 

If we think of education as helping the individual to 
come from where he is to where he ought to be, as Hinman 
expresses it, or if we think of an individual during his 


312 INTELLIGENT PARENTHOOD 


education getting the equipment for future life to make 
him a higher and better individual, to help him give 
greater service and to always be a happier individual be- 
cause of that greater service, then we must correlate our ~ 
dance into that, and we, of course, feel that we are able to 
do that. 

As I said before, every person thinks his hobby is the 
thing that can do it; therefore, I think the dance should 
be so fundamentally given that it can adjust itself to any 
age and to the requirements of the age, not only the age 
with respect to the individual, but the age of history or 
evolution. 

It has been most interesting to me to work with the 
dance from a new point of view. Miss Doebler, who has 
really worked on the problem of the dance as an educa- 
tional institution, has worked with people electing it, peo- 
ple taking it because they knew they would enjoy it and 
wanted to work with it. I took it in that respect and 
always did love the response to music, the feeling of well 
being and the expressive reactions, but I did not know 
just how it would react after I got out among people who 
had to tuke it. During my first year away from Wisconsin 
I taught at the University of Colorado and there people 
elected it and I was very much encouraged. I thought it 
might be Miss Doebler’s wonderful personality, and I 
was so relieved to find it was the work itself. Then when 
I was transferred to Northwestern, I was appalled that 
Dean Dennis at the School of Speech thought this type of 
work was the best suited to his particular need in the 
dramatic and self-expression field. I was very much ap- 
palled to find that everybody had to take it, and I, being. 
a very sensitive individual, just wanting so badly to have 


CULTURAL NEEDS OF CHILD $13 


everybody want to take it, and enjoy it (you cannot im- 
-agine how it hurts to have some one in your group not 
enjoying what you enjoy), was very much worried. Of 
course, being my first year there I wanted to do what was 
right, so I thought that I would go ahead and see what 
would happen. 

I was relieved and surprised and delighted to find in 
one year that no matter what point of view they started 
with, Miss Doebler’s work was so fundamental they all 
enjoyed it, and with that one year I felt quite positive 
that the work was so all-round and fundamental that it 
suited any type of individual. 

I remember so well one girl who later on at the end 
of the year (I am so glad she didn’t tell me at the first of 
the year, I would have been very self-conscious) said that 
she had not planned to take the course because the minute 
she found out she had to take dancing she did not want it. 
She didn’t think it suited her at all. It was important for 
certain individuals, but not for her. She was a great de- 
bater, a splendid orator, and she thought it would be no 
place for her if she had to take dancing. Well, she had to 
take it, and she stayed in school, and at the end of the 
year confessed she was amazed that there was something 
so fundamental and such a satisfaction in the self-ex- 
pressive end of it. She realized it was not something out- 
side of herself. There was something in the work really a 
part of herself. 

Miss Doebler in her interpretation, has taken the 
point of view of man and his process of evolution and his 
reactions in every possible way. 

Of course, you people think of it in relation to the 
child. The mother often decides that ‘‘Now is the time for 


314 INTELLIGENT PARENTHOOD 


my daughter to take dancing.’ But she does not stop to 
realize that she should correlate that with other fields of 
education, that the mother should have a certain aim in 


her education and see that the type of dancing she is tak- 


ing correlates with her aims and ideas of education. But 
I feel a great deal about this like the previous speaker did 
about kinking. I would like to have classes of mothers 
just to have them realize how fundamental dancing is, and 
then have them decide for themselves, because we feel 
more and more we want to give the child something which 
will develop him. 

We so often think of the dance as making the child 
beautiful in bodily reactions, graceful in response to mu- 
sic, but we never stop to think about whether the connec- 
tion between the mind, the soul, and the body is made, 
whether we have correlation in that respect. Our trend 
of physical education is, of course, moving toward that 
end. All education is moving that way. We no longer 
think of them as being separate parts, but a correlation of 
all the parts, so we want to keep in mind that these are 
the three elements that should enter in—the mind, the 
soul, and the body. | 

We want to remember that in our education the dance 
should promote the growth of the individual, should stim- 
ulate the child to creative activity, and make him self-ex- 
pressive. As Dr. Horn this morning said, ‘““We want self- 
expression and greater poise. Self-expression alone is not 
the greatest fulfillment that we wish; we want self-ex- 
pression with responsibility.’’ Here, too, we want to give 
that self-expression something which is big, something 
which has depth, not something just exterior. 

I have so often seen a little child trained in the set 


ee 


CULTURAL NEEDS OF CHILD 315 


and old form of the dance. It has lovely movement, and 
when she is giving her dance you feel the whole audience 
appreciates it. It is a realization of the beauty of form 
and movement, but I realize that the dance is just from 
her neck down. Perhaps the child is lovely in herself. It 
is the loveliness of the child which just cannot help but 
express itself, but the child is so intent on getting those 
steps just right, and to fit in with the music, that if the 
music is wrong in a certain part, the child hesitates. She 
is so intent that the natural loveliness she wants to radiate 
and should radiate is held in check. 

I find that when girls come to college they so often 
have had dancing before, and there are certain things we 
have to break down before we can get to the real individ- 
ual. I have a girl in mind who just recently has shown 
the dramatic ability she has. Before this she was always 
pulling taffy in everything she was doing. The work of 
her arms had come from such a set training she could not 
really express the thing she had in mind. She was so 
trained in her movements she could do nothing else but 
just pull taffy. All of a sudden the light has come to her, 
and she has to break all this down before she can really 
express herself and be herself. 

I could, of course, speak on this forever, but I want 
to enumerate a few things that we think of in giving danc- 
ing to the college student. One of the things that Miss 
Doebler’s work does, so often neglected, is the realization 
that this age is an age of tension, and we have to work for 
relaxation. I would just love to experiment on you who 
are here, and ask you to relax. You would be amazed how 
hard it is to relax; how you have to think about it and 
work for it. You must establish a connection between 


316 INTELLIGENT PARENTHOOD 


your mind and muscle before you can really have that 
relaxation. 


If we want to aim for that in the college girl, then 


certainly we want to do something in choosing our type of 
work for the child not to bring that tension in, because 
the child has that natural ability of relaxation and flexi- 
bility. It is amazing how soon we tie up and tense up. I 
have been working with children, and it is surprising how 
soon the muscles become tense, how the nerve reaction is 
so strong that the body is no longer flexible and relaxed 
as we so much need it in this day and age. 

Then we think of the problem of relieving self-con- 
sciousness. That, of course, is an element that has to be 
gotten rid of before we can really express ourselves. If 
we are working with that with the grown-up child, or the 
college girl, we certainly want to do everything not to 
bring that element into the younger child, because he will 
not be self-conscious in earlier years unless it is thrust 
upon him. That is the part of the work which is so help- 
ful. It is true the other type of instruction emphasized 
solo work to such a great extent, but we like to'all work 
together. It is the fun of working together, the social ele- 
ment and the fact that self-consciousness is relieved 
through that social element, the fact that we are getting 
aid from somebody else that makes it so valuable. The 
whole trend in the work before, of course, has been a cer- 
tain set movement, and our whole trend has gotten away 
from that; we want to get natural movement. 

The ballet and the set work itself aims to stretch cer- 
tain muscles and to have the individual get certain bal- 


EE a 


CULTURAL NEEDS OF CHILD 317 


ance and control but our certain trend now is to get into 
the natural way. For example, physical education first 
taught us to walk with the toe first and down at the heel; 
now we think of it in its natural and best way, using the 
foot as we would normally to its best and most hygienic 
value. All education is following that same trend. The 
dance is getting back to the natural, the easy, free move- 
ment of the body, the way we will be able to use it all the 
rest of our lives. When we think of the physical work, we 
want to think of what it will do to the individual when 
forty or fifty, and so on. That is why when we teach col- 
lege students hygiene and physiology they think it is not 
for them because. they have not felt any of the needs as 
yet. If we could only instil the idea of what we have to, or 
might have to, endure at forty, or fifty, we would have a 
much easier time. 

Our problem has been changing the individual from 
set work, strained work, artificial poses, and reactions to 
the natural, but we have forgotten the fact that we want 
to use the mind in relation to it. 

We find such wonderful opportunities to correlate 
the arts, the art of music with the art of dancing. I know 
that some of the girls have felt that if they had had noth- 
ing else than the appreciation and the feeling, the bodily 
reaction to music, it would still have been very worth 
while. In working with the dance we should always just 
use good music, so we give the college girl that musical 
analysis to give her a greater appreciation of music and 
of the bodily response to it. Of course, in the child we 
want to have something like that, give it good music so it 


318 INTELLIGENT PARENTHOOD 


can be inspired, and have the inspiration of the music, and 
carry it along all the rest of its life. You have sometimes 
worked with a certain lovely piece of music and when you — 
hear it again you have a friendly attitude toward it, and 
you feel a part of it. 

Then we want to break down inhibitions. That is one 
of the things now in the work. You notice a little tiny 
child has many, many movements first, and all her move- 
ments will be crude, but finally they will blend down to 
the movement you want and can use. If we have to break 
down many inhibitions due to self-consciousness, tension, 
wrong muscular reaction, if we have to break them down 
in a grown-up child, we want to see that they do not enter 
into the small child, and see that it keeps its flexibility, 
its motor control, guidance, poise, and bodily action. 

And then almost our hardest work with the college 
girl is to reinstate that inborn imagination and that crea- 
tive ability, that spiritual something which every child 
has. I would like to mention here that I am coming to 
these meetings not only as an educator, but also as a 
mother, and I know myself that I would give anything to 
retain that lovely, radiating, spiritual something that this 
little ten-year-old girl of mine has. Some way I would 
never want that to be held in check. I want to turn it into 
the right trend, to give it something big and beautiful and 
fine. So if we want to instil that imagination into the 
older child, we certainly want to give everything and do 
everything to retain it in the little child. 

My plea is that if we parents are considering the art 
of the dance for the child, by all means think of it as high 





CULTURAL NEEDS OF CHILD 319 


as the other elements in education; consider your aims 
and education and then choose your dance accordingly. 


Cuairman Apxins: This last gathering seems to be 
a little like a family party, and it would be the finest touch 
of all if we could have you meet some of the people who 
have helped to make it a success, but the hour is late. We 
will just say goodby, and Godspeed until we meet again, 
mothers and teachers, together. 












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INDEX © 


Address of welcome, 1 


Adjustments of later adoles- 
cense, 195 ff. 


Adkins, Alta, 295 


Adolescent, problems of the, 
181 ff. 


Adolescent period, 
tics of, 183 


Adolescent training, imperative 
aims in, 183 ff 


Aims in adolescent training, 183 
Alschuler, Mrs. Alfred S., 133 
Anderson, John E., 98 


Baldwin, Dr. Bird T., 149 
Beatty, Willard W., 166 
Behaviorisms, 123 

Binzel, Alma, 307 

Blanton, Margaret Gray, 33 
Boaz, quoted, 267 
Burnham, William H., 183 
Burt, quoted, 271 
Burton, E. D., quoted, 139 


characteris- 


Campbell, quoted, 236 


Central Council of Childhood 
Education, 295 


Character: defined, 234; devel- 
opment of, 110; training for, 
215; of youth of ‘today, 243 


Character-building, 179 
Character-training, 178 
Charters, Dr. Werrett Wallace, 9 


Child, the: and constructive dis- 
cipline, 41; and emotional life 


of parent, 38; as an individual, 
36; tired, 71-82; and unful- 
filled desires of parent, 37 


Child study, 2 


Child Study Association of 
America, 4 


Child-guidance clinic, aims of, 
42, 43 


Childhood: determinisms in, 
112 ff.; a selected period of 
life, 113 


Children and the truth, 40 


Civic education, instruction in, 
280 ff. 


Cod-liver oil, 60, 61 

Conflict situations, 145 
Congenital word blindness, 276 
Control of fears and worries, 13 
Creative dancing, 310 

Cultural needs of the child, 295 ff. 
Cunningham, Dr. Bess, 147 


Dancing, creative, 310 

Davenport, quoted, 116 

Death, truth about, 41 

Death-rate: and health super- 
vision, 48, 49; of infants, low 
in Chicago, 49 

Dearborn, Walter F., 267 

Delinquency, sex, 176 

Department of Health, 135 


Determinisms in childhood, 
112 ff. 


Detroit kindergarten tests, 142 
Dewey theory, 145 


323 


324 


Direct instruction in civic and 
moral education, 280 ff. 


Discipline, constructive, 41 
Downing, quoted, 129 
Drake, Mrs. Daphne, 5 


Early years, importance of, 83 ff. 


Educative equipment for the 
child, 108 ff. 


Eggs, importance of, in diet, 148 
Eliot, Dr. Martha M., 58 


Elizabeth McCormick Memorial 
Fund, 135 


Emancipation from the home, 
196-205 


Emerson, quoted, 118 
Emotional stability, 105 
Endocrinology, 122 
Energy of children 98 


Environment, 2, 35, 36, 101 ff., 
116, 118 

Evolution, 113 

Examination: mental, of babies, 
90; physical, 136 ff., 90 

Examinations and the child, 51 


Father, the, 91, 218; responsi- 
bility of, 222 ff.; and sex edu- 
cation, 175 


Fatherhood, attitude to, 231 
Fatigue, 71 ff., tests for, '72 
Fear: control of, 13; of death, 41 
Franklin Nursery School, 134 
Freedom of the child, 106 
Freud, 125, 126 


Gesell, Dr. Arnold, 255 
Gesell tests, 142 
Goddard, quoted, 194 


Gruenberg, Mrs. Sidonie Mats- 
ner, 5, 153 


INTELLIGENT PARENTHOOD 


Habits, 241 

Health habits and fatigue, 73 ff. 

Health schedule, 78 ff. 

Health supervision: definition of, 
47-48; need of continuous, 47— 
57; aims of, 53 

Hedger, Dr. Caroline, 47 

Heliotherapy, 58 

Heterosexuality, 196, 205-14 

Heredity, 34, 35, 53, 116, 120 

Hill, Patty Smith, 87, 147, 297 

Hippocrates, 58 


Home: change in, 90, 91; and 
control, 14; environment fur- 
nished by, 2; and mental 
health, 33; and obedience, oe 
opportunity of the modern, 9 
a place of friendships and pane 
piness, 13; and the rational 
attitude, 11, 12; and sex edu- 
cation, 162 


Horn, Ernest, 280 
Hull-House, 141 
Huxley, quoted, 240 


Impulses, 124 

Infancy and mental hygiene, 259 
Infant health, 49, 50 

Infant Welfare Society, 50 
Instinctive behavior, 34 
Instincts, 124 


Institute for Juvenile Research, 
139 ff 


Intellect, 124 

Intellectual development, 267 
Intelligence and character, 233 
Iowa State University, Preschool 
Laboratories, 134 

Irwin and Marks, quoted, 268 


Kawin, Ethel, 139 
Kern, Mrs. Mary Root, 300 


: 


INDEX 


Kilpatrick, quoted, 116 


Kranz, Mrs. Margaret Schulv, 
310 


Kuhlman-Binet test, 142 


Lawton, Mrs. Eva L., 1 
Learning process, the, 196 ff. 
Léo, Gontraud, 59 

Linguistic play, 109 


Martin, quoted, 237, 250 
Mason, Max, v 

Mental deficiency, 114 

Mental health, mobilizing for, 33 
Mental health program, 139 
Mental hygiene, 259 

Merrill Palmer School tests, 142 


Method of teaching sex educa- 
tion, 166 


Mill, John Stuart, quoted, 223 
Montessori Houses of Childhood, 
87 


Moral education, instruction in, 
280 ff. 


Moral qualities, development of, 
110 


Mother, the, 224; change in 
status of, 91; and sex educa- 
tion, 175 


Motivation of young child, 98 
Murchison, quoted, 236, 248 
Murphy, Mary E., 135 

Music, cultural influence of, 300 
Myrick, Helen, 153 


National conference of nursery 
schools, 133 


National Kindergarten College, 
141 


Neumann, Henry, 222 


Nursery school, 86, 87 ff.; equip- 
ment of, 88; needed by certain 


325 


mothers, 93 ff.; and present 
social order, 87 ff.; and Satur- 
day and Sunday, 109; workers 
in, 142 

Nursery school program, 136 ff. 

Nursery schools, research possi- 
bilities in, 133 

Nurture, 116 

Nutrition, 54; work in, 50 


Obedience and the home, 11 
Opportunity of the home, 9 


Parents: influence of the, on 
school children, 267; present- 
day, 255; and sex education, 
155, 174 


Parent education, social signifi- 
cance of, 260 


Parenthood, profession of, 33 
Pattern reactions, inherited, 100 
Pediatrician, work of, 34 
Personality, integration of, 185 
Personality traits, 143 

Physical health program, 135 
Pintner-Patterson tests, 142 


Preschool age, the social impor- 
tance of, 255 


Preschool child, the, and the 
parent, 255 ff. 


Preschool education, 87 
Prevention, program of, 51 
Problems of training teachers, 9 
Problem situations, 143 
Program for Conference, 4 
Program of prevention, 51 


Prostitution and sex education, 
176 


Psychiatrist, work of, 34 
Psychic determinisms, 127 
Psychologist, work of, 34 
Purpose of Association, 1 


326 


Rational attitude and the home, 
12 


Rational -habits, schedule for, 
78 ff. 


Research material, 145 


Rickets, 60, 63, 114, 115; and 
cod-liver oil, 60 


Rollier, 58-59 


Seham, Dr. Max, 71 
Self-activity, 192 
Self-determination, 10 
Self-discovery in adolescents, 184 


Sex education, 153 ff.; methods 
of teaching, 166; and parents, 
155, 174; prostitution and, 176; 
Winnetka plan for, 160 


Sex information, 153 ff. 


Social contacts provided in nur- 


sery school, 109 ff. 
Social determinisms, 128 
Social success of adolescents, 188 
Stanford-Binet test, 142 
Study group, advantages of, 3 
Subefficiency, chronic, 74 ff. 


Sun baths, 62-70; rules for, 70; 
technique of, 65 


Sunlight, 58-71 
Superstitions, old, 120 


INTELLIGENT PARENTHOOD 


Teachers: influence of the, on in- 
tellectual development of chil- 
dren, 267 ff.; and sex educa- 
tion, 164 


Ten Commandments, 247 

Tests, 142 

Tired child, the, 71-82 

Truth: and children, 40; about 
death, 41; about sex, 153 ff. 

Tuberculosis, 58, 59 


Ultra-violet rays, 61, 62 


University of Iowa Welfare Sta- 
tion, 145 


Washburne, Carleton, 160 
White, Edna N., 85 

Wile, Dr. Ira S., 112, 233 
Williams, Dr. Frankwood, 195 


Winnetka plan for sex education, 
160 


Woodward, Frederic Campbell, 
217 


Woodworth, quoted, 113 


Yale studies of early mental 
growth, 263 


Yarros, Dr. Rachelle S., 174 i 
Youth of today, character of, 243 


PRINTED IN THE U.S.A. 


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